440 – Comparing WordPress page builder accessibility: in-depth insights from Amber Hinds

[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 440, entitled Comparing WordPress, page builder accessibility, in-depth insights from Amber Hinds. It was published on Thursday, the 9th of October, 2025.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we join Amber for that chat, a few bits of housekeeping.

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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, I have Amber Hinds. Amber is the CEO of Equalize Digital. She is heavily involved in the WordPress accessibility space, and today we feature some really, really in-depth research that Amber has done into WordPress page builders. There are 19 page builders plus Gutenberg, which she inspects at a very, very granular level.

She tells us all about how the project got started and how it ran last year. Improvements that they've made to the project. The way the project is structured. Which page builders did they choose, and which aspects of those page builders did they decide to investigate? How the research was done. How the scoring system works. How it tries to be as impartial as possible. And of course the bit that you're most interested in, which Page Builder turned out to be the most accessible.

That is all coming up next, and I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast by Amber Hinds. Hello, Amber?

[00:05:06] Amber Hinds: Hey.

[00:05:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. Good, Thank you. Nice to have you with us. We're, we're firmly in the, in the grip of accessibility on this podcast because, I'll get Amber to do her, potted bio in a moment, but we're gonna be talking about a really long, detailed and utterly thorough survey.

not survey, what is the right word for it? Amber, what's it called?

[00:05:27] Amber Hinds: Research project.

[00:05:29] Nathan Wrigley: with research project. and it's, something that I'm gonna urge you to read. Basically, this podcast is going to make a degree of sense if you don't read it. But if you do read it and then come back and listen to the podcast, it's gonna, everything will just lock in much, better.

There's tons of detail. not only detail about how the whole project has been carried out, but detail in terms of results, just like oodle masses of data. and I'm gonna link to it in the show notes, but if you wanna go to Google, Google this WordPress page builder accessibility comparison.

2025, the numerals and that will get you to, equalize digital.com/all of that. and then just pause this podcast, go and check that out, and then come back. And honestly, you'll have a much better time with this podcast 'cause you've understood what the heck we're talking about because lots of charts and it's very hard in audio.

To explain charts, but, okay. Anyway, with that bit out of the way, Amber, will you just introduce us yourself? And the reason I want you to do this particularly, and I know it's boring, right? But why would somebody listen to you unless you were credible? Why would anybody want to know what's coming out of your mouth?

Unless you have Heritage doing this kind of accessibility work and you do. So I want you to say it so I, I know that's a boring first question, but there we go.

[00:06:49] Amber Hinds: That's all right. So I'm Amber Hines. I'm the CEO of a company called Equalize Digital, which focuses on WordPress accessibility. I've been working in the WordPress space since 2010 and with accessibility since 2014. and I. So my company has an accessibility plugin called Accessibility Checker that does automated testing and fixing.

we also are purely focused on accessibility, so we do audits and remediation. We do user testing with people with disabilities for clients, both in the WordPress space and outside of the WordPress space. Like right now, we have just wrapped up a project testing Libra Chat, which is an open source. AI chat platform, which is super fun.

So we're all about accessibility on the web. beyond that, I am a board member for the WordPress Accessibility Day nonprofit, which holds an annual conference once a year. I am the lead organizer for the WordPress accessibility Meetup, and I participate in the core accessibility team

[00:08:03] Nathan Wrigley: And that is why I asked that question because you just laid it all out, didn't you? You are, entirely credible. You are the credible person, or at least one of. Many, but that's,

Well,

[00:08:14] Amber Hinds: I don't know if I would say I'm the,

[00:08:16] Nathan Wrigley: you are certainly one of the,

[00:08:17] Amber Hinds: I will not take that

[00:08:18] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, that's great. okay, I have a question related to that and, I'm curious, again, it's not related to the topic at hand, but I am curious on a personal level, why this niche, why, accessibility for you?

What was the bit, I'm sure there's a backstory there, maybe it's something personal that you don't wish to share, and if that's fine, we'll just move on. But is there a piece that you can explain why accessibility became the thing for you?

[00:08:40] Amber Hinds: I got introduced to accessibility just because of some of the clients that we had, particularly in higher education here in the US They are required to have accessible websites. So that was my initial introduction to it. I personally have always felt like I. Want to be doing something that is very meaningful.

I mentioned I'm on the board of a nonprofit. I've actually founded two other nonprofits and run them before handing them off to other people at different times in my life. I have volunteered for lots of nonprofits for a very long time, and I think for me personally as a business owner, I've always been drawn to what can I do that feels important and like it gives positive benefit back to the world.

I have four children and when I'm not working or when I'm working, I am not with my children. And, so when I think about, what does that mean? what do I want the impact of that work to be and that time away from my children? I really wanna know that it does something special.

so I got introduced to accessibility and I think what really flipped a switch for me was we had the first project that we ever said, okay, we're gonna hire people who are blind to come in and test. So we had been doing accessibility for a while and we had like people who were cited that knew more about accessibility than us.

Doing, testing our work, but we had never actually said, we're gonna go out and find users. And the first project that we brought users in to test was, it just, I mean it, it showed me a lot more about some of the nuance, and I always recommend this if you have the opportunity to have users test your work and to just talk to someone and watch them.

Navigate something you've built with a screen reader or some other alternative input device if they use something else and then talk to them about that experience, it's really going to show you how important that is. And then through my work in the on the accessibility team, I became friends with a couple of people who are blind and, for me it's just very much Why shouldn't they have the same ability to buy things or order food or clothes or whatever that might be on the internet? As me look up a, menu for a restaurant like they are people I love and, I don't know why we would say that's not, that It's okay. To just say, no, they can't do that.

They're not in my demographic. I don't want their

[00:11:30] Nathan Wrigley: I think the.

[00:11:31] Amber Hinds: so for me it's very, it's moral and it goes into this deeper. if I'm gonna be working on something, let's work on something meaningful. And so I had for a while, like we were, we became a certified B corporation because I was so committed to this.

I want our company to be more than just, I'm trying to make money. And so I don't know. that's

[00:11:53] Nathan Wrigley: No, I think you've literally provided the perfect answer. You used the word twice and it is the word, and it is the word meaningful. it's it's profoundly important. if you wander around in, so I'm gonna describe the UK too. If you wander around the uk. In, let's say the high street.

You go into the high street, there are ramps, there are doors, there are buttons for those doors in appropriate places. People who, in other words, legislation happened a long time ago to make the physical world. More accessible. It became criminal negligence. Criminal negligence to, to not provide physical access to people who might otherwise be unable to access those buildings.

And now of course, the whole world has moved online. the High Street is in decline, but everything's moving online and, but we've got this. We've got this problem that the buildings, if you like websites, let's call you. You can make the comparison there. A building and a website. It doesn't have the ramp, it doesn't have the button in the right place, et cetera, et cetera.

In other words, we've got this whole new part of life, the internet. the barriers are still up. The ramp doesn't exist, but the steps are there and so on. And you're right. It's just, it's meaningful work. It's like chiseling away and slowly trying to make the world more accessible. And I love that. I think, you've, captured that really, beautifully.

The word is meaningful and I appreciate that you've said that was exactly, that was music to my ears. Lovely. Thank you. So let's move on to the, topic at hand. part of your well self-described remit, I guess nobody, went out and forced you to do this, but for two years in a row, I think 2024 was the first time.

2025 is the second time you've run this, page builder accessibility comparison. And as I said at the top of the show, this is clearly a profoundly large amount of work. There's, there's no way this is taking you a few hours. This is. Presumably days, weeks, maybe months. I dare I say, just, run us through, the length of time, just, that.

How long did this study take you to do?

[00:13:58] Amber Hinds: So it took over 200 hours and it was actually two people's worth of work. my, our accessibility specialist, Maria, did a lot of the initial testing. I did set up work. And, which I'm sure we'll dive into what all of that is in a minute. and then also came back and retested things or she and I looked at things together if we weren't sure, like how should we score this thing?

and then obviously once we had all of the testing done, we had to draft the report. So it's over 200 hours. We started in June and we finished in

[00:14:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so it is a laundry list of different ways in the WordPress space to, to create web pages, if you like. So just about every tool that you can imagine, and it's classified as. Page builders, but actually under the remit of this, as we may discover in a moment, are things like themes as well. But broadly speaking, the word page builder is used to describe anything, any technology in the WordPress space, which can put pixels and words and images on pages, that kind of thing.

And there's absolutely loads of them. And you've gone through this sort of ranking mechanism, and I'd like to unpick that. But I, guess the, initial question would be, why do you wanna rank them against each other? Because, if you've got like a winner. It feels oh, that's weird.

But then at the same time, if you don't have a winner, how the heck you've got to, I guess you've got to call out the good to highlight the bad. I know that seems like a weird way of phrasing it, unless somebody can be held up as a, this is great, look at the way they did this, then the people who haven't done that work don't really have a, have, something to aim at.

So this is more carrot than stick, I expect.

[00:15:40] Amber Hinds: I hope so. I'm sure the people at the bottom don't feel like it. yeah. So why did we do it? It started with. Because I run the meetup, people would send me messages and say, okay, what is the best theme or what is the best tool to use to build WordPress websites That will give me a good starting point?

There are plenty of developers out there who build everything custom, but the reality of WordPress is that the vast majority of people, including very technical people. Do not build everything custom. And the vast majority of people are choosing existing theme and block library collections or page builder tools to speed up their development process so that they can launch websites faster.

And if these tools do not provide an accessible starting point, then no matter what they do. They, unless they're going to come in and write a bunch of JavaScript code or add temp, like re template, all of these tools, right? Like basically rebuild them or fix them themselves. Then they are going to be building a website that has accessibility problems off the bat, regardless of if they've chosen the right colors and they've put headings in the right order, and they put all texts on their images because the underlying functionality of the components they've selected.

It and, so people kept asking me this and I didn't know the answer. And so last year I said, I'm gonna try and figure out the answer. So in 2024, I looked at 10, and then after releasing that report, we got a lot of, Hey, can you also do, and so this year. We looked at 19 plus Gutenberg,

[00:17:33] Nathan Wrigley: so 20 in total.

[00:17:35] Amber Hinds: is my baseline, but there's less testing for Gutenberg because there's less blocks and functionality in core WordPress than there is actually in these page building tools.

So a lot of the things I looked at in the page building tools didn't

[00:17:51] Nathan Wrigley: if you keep up this doubling rate of, of tools tested?

[00:17:55] Amber Hinds: Now.

[00:17:56] Nathan Wrigley: No, Next year it'll be 40. no, let's not go there. So, I can well understand that.

[00:18:02] Amber Hinds: I'll add

[00:18:03] Nathan Wrigley: carry on. I think I crosstalk you. Say that again.

[00:18:06] Amber Hinds: Oh, that's okay. I was just gonna say, I don't think that I will add more next year.

[00:18:11] Nathan Wrigley: you've gone for, you've gone for all the popular ones. So basically, if you can think of a tool in the WordPress space, it's probably in there. There may be a few outliers that have not made it in there, but that's true, isn't it? Most page builders, the intention of that tool is to speed up the workflow and as soon as you invoke the ui, whatever is in that UI is.

You work with. And if you don't know about accessibility and the UI doesn't tell you actually there's extra work that you could be doing here. that's it. That's it, isn't it? It's game over. You've done what you needed to do, you publish the page and you move on and you do another one. So I suppose part of the survey here, part of the endeavor is to, It's to raise awareness, the ones at the top have been doing great work. The ones further down, maybe there's some intelligence that they can get from that. I'm curious to know if any of the, actually don't tell me, but I'm, I would be curious to know, maybe you can tell me afterwards if, any of the ones that ended up further down the list actually do ever reach out and say, okay, we hold our hands up.

Let's, let's chat because, there's definitely work to be done.

[00:19:12] Amber Hinds: I could answer that a little bit based on 2024 because there were several that did not do well in 2024 that did much better this year. And I know that they used our report, so like Brex is an example that made major improvements. Beaver Builder as well. but B Brix, for example, in 2024.

All of their accordions and their tab components were just built with divs. There were no buttons, which means they could not be focused with the keyboard and they could not be opened with the keyboard at all. they were only. You had to be able to use a mouse to use those components. And the Brix team had fixed that by the time we did 2025.

And they did reach out to me and they were like, they asked for clarification. And since the 2025 report went out, they asked for further clarification. So I know that there are, companies in these reports that are taking them and using them to improve

[00:20:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a mate.

[00:20:18] Amber Hinds: And they're one, there are others.

It's not just

[00:20:20] Nathan Wrigley: And it's ama the way that you've laid it out. So for a start, everything can be gained from one single sort of Google Doc spreadsheet. if, but you, have to request access for that. But if you scroll down to the bottom of this survey, you'll see, table after table where every single builder is.

So for example, like one of the tables is forms and every single builder is pitted against the exact same criteria as every other one. And a company or a product where it's just green ticks all the way down, that's fine. that's probably, there's not a lot of work or any work to be done there.

But any company working for the, page builder where there's just a bunch of red crosses, you can see the bits which need improving. So you've actually. A consequence of this report is you have actually painted a, really nice target for those companies to look at and they can come to your survey and say, okay, we can do this.

We obviously do that pretty well, but we haven't done this, and this. And and I think what you'll discover if you go through this survey and you get to the bottom is. There's an awful lot of red crosses, which means there's an awful lot of work to be done. There's a few high flyers, if you like, and we'll get to that towards the end.

But there's an awful lot of, work still to be done. yeah. Okay. Let's get into the sort of methodology of it. You did it really recently, you carried out. So obviously if this work had been done over an extended period of time, six to eight months, the comparison wouldn't be all that fair, but you did it all during, June and August, 2025.

So you've tried to. Capture it all in those 200 hours, in that little bit of time, the website will show you the 19 page builders plus Gutenberg. They're all there to be listed. But what was the, what, are some of the criteria in terms of how do you make sure that this is as fair, if you like, as possible?

There's a lot here, but just, unpack some of those bits, some of the top level items to ensure that the comparison was a fair one.

[00:22:14] Amber Hinds: So this is something I did differently this year from last year. Last year when I was testing, I was just. I was testing a loan and I was just going for the fastest way I could get components on a page. So a lot of times these tools have, oh, pick a theme and it'll spin it up with fake content and all that stuff.

But what ended up happening was there. It that I think caused a little bit more noise that I had to ignore, because the content and the scenario was different on every website. So this time what I did was I made a WordPress multi-site, and actually if you request access to the data, you'll also get the link to that site so you can go look at all of these.

Websites. So each subsite has the builder and it has identical content on it. as far as like the exact same pages, the exact same navigation menus, the exact same blog posts with images, and all of the starter content that I set up has zero accessibility problems. So even though these aren't real websites, I put all text on the images.

I did all of that so that we know, okay, we are starting from the exact same point in time. And then. And it's all perfectly accessible with WordPress core. And then I am adding the builder, and then I went through on a components page, and I put in the exact same components, and I did my very best to.

Configure them in the exact same way. So you were talking about forms. If there was a form in the plugin or a form builder in the plugin or tool, then I would try to have the exact same fields, like name, company name, phone number, telephone, right? So that I was looking at as much of an apples to apples comparison as I could.

And then. And then with that for each component, and that's what's nice about these tables and sheets is I was very granular. So it's not just something like tabs are accessible, right? It would say like the tab controls are a button or can be triggered with the space bar. And then there's a separate check that says, the tab container has a tab list.

Roll the tabs have a tab roll. The tab panels have a tab panel roll, right? Each of these are individual checks, so they might pass one, but not the other. and, so I tried to be very granular in that way. and as much as possible we tried to give them a straight pass or fail in every check was something where you either got it or you didn't.

there was no black and white. There are a few instances though, where I did give them this in the middle ground kind of concern. It's like technically it passes, but there's something about it that we feel like might. Cause users to either enter the content in a wrong way so that it would fail or it's very difficult to achieve, or there was something else that just seemed potentially problematic to us.

and on the, full Google spreadsheet has explanations for all of them.

[00:25:16] Nathan Wrigley: Let me just read that back to you to make sure I've fully understood. I, it, there's a multi-site network, which we can have access to the front end of each of those if we request it. So you can see what all the builders are doing. And in, in order to improve on 2020 fours version of the survey, every e you've mapped the exact same navigation, so the same amount of pages with where possible, the exact same content, the content that you've pulled in is.

Pre-vetted to be accessible. So if you were to, if you were to, examine it without invoking the, you used the word components. And so for that, I'm imagining the bits and pieces that make up the, page build, the bits that you can drag in from the sidebar, the paragraphs and the sliders and the, the headings and the images and all of those different components that you can add in pre that.

It, they were all on a level playing field. Everybody got the same. And then you started to use their components to build up the bits and pieces. am I right so far? Yep. Okay. And then further to that, I think you didn't, you also, you didn't use any kind of like third party. So there's a whole ecosystem.

Let's say for example, around Elemental, it's this giant page builder, millions and millions of websites. This whole third party ecosystem of things that you can drop in. Many of them probably tackling accessibility, I don't really know. But you didn't use any of those. It was just the core product, but in every case, I think also it was the pro.

Core product. If they had a paid for version, you somehow came by that paid for it, got it off a client, what have you. And you used the pro version without any third parties again. Have I got that about right?

[00:26:56] Amber Hinds: Is correct. so it was, most of them were pro and yeah, sometimes we already had it. Sometimes we borrowed it from someone. Sometimes we went to the builder and the builder gave it to us for free. There's a few, including some that didn't do very well, but they, when I reached out and I said, Hey, we wanna include you this year, they said, yes, we would love this feedback.

And, one afterwards when I sent him the report, he said, I knew we weren't gonna do

[00:27:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh

[00:27:25] Amber Hinds: So it's,

[00:27:25] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, '

[00:27:27] Amber Hinds: cause you get nervous. And I'm like, they gave me this thing for free to test and then I'm gonna like probably be like, it sucks.

[00:27:32] Nathan Wrigley: you gave him a free accessibility check, That's one

[00:27:35] Amber Hinds: But exactly. They got a free accessibility audit out of it, which is quite valuable.

but, yes, no, no third party components. And this came up a little bit like with Bricks last year when I mentioned their tabs and accordions weren't functional, and a bunch of people in the bricks community was like, yeah, but nobody uses. Accordions, they use some X, Y, Z plugin. That is way better. And I was like, yeah, but it doesn't matter.

I don't, brick should be making things that function and whatever builder should be making things that function. Baseline, you shouldn't have to add extra. And it's the same thing with divvy. Divvy always does very poorly. and there are three or four different add-on plugins for divvy that will fix accessibility problems in divvy.

Like they have some incredibly significant but also very easy to fix problems. Like no focus outlines when you tab through the page, but. I don't think that divvy scores should get to go up if I go add a third party plugin to make it accessible, because divvy you shouldn't have to pay extra to add accessibility to your

[00:28:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that makes sense. okay, we've laid the groundworks there, and then you've got this thing, which, okay. Just to give you a, an idea of just how in depth this is, it's not like there's just one criteria for each of these things. There's in many cases, dozens, multiple dozens of things. So for as an example, let's just read the first one into the record.

So this is the navigation accessibility. the things that were tested were uses the nav tag. nav tag is labeled, users can define the nav tag. Aria label dropdown keyboards, sorry, dropdowns, keyboard. Accessible, separate buttons for opening and closing dropdowns. Call to action button styles achievable in primary navigation without requiring custom CSS.

I'm gonna go on, visible keyboard focus. Mobile menu is keyboard accessible. Works on Zoom, and that's where that one ends. But that's just the. Build a navigation, accessibility. And then for each of the other ones, of which there's many, there are, there's that plus in many cases, significantly more than that.

So every single, it's not like this is one size fits all. Oh, navigation pass fail. No, It's this bit of navigation, this bit of navigation, this bit of navigation. And then you give them all, it's pretty binary. It's pass fail. And then, I can't remember, you had two more,

[00:30:10] Amber Hinds: concern.

and not

[00:30:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so there's an na, it doesn't it, it's not available there, but then there's a pass, a fail, and a concern.

Is the concern one, the kind of like the intermediate, I'm not sure what to do thing. What's the concern? One.

[00:30:25] Amber Hinds: That's what I was talking about earlier where for a concern mostly passes, but there's something, and it's a little different on how it was, how they were rated or why they were given a concern based on what the test was in the component or something like that. In the Google sheet, they're all explained.

So that, that would be what I would recommend is get access to the Google sheet. We couldn't put it on the webpage just because, these tables already sideways scroll, which I really

[00:30:52] Nathan Wrigley: There's a lot.

[00:30:53] Amber Hinds: but there's just, it's too much information to put on a, webpage.

[00:30:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so all of these scores accrue and, every pass gets a singular point. So this is interesting. So there's no waiting to any particular thing. Now that's curious because I guess for ease of use, you've got to go for something like that. But I also imagine that some things are way more important than other things, some, peculiar little thing that you're testing for.

If it's a fail, it's a no point. If it's. Pass. It's a one point which might equal something that, that is just so self-evidently worth more than one point. How? Why did you go for that methodology that's curious.

[00:31:35] Amber Hinds: So I think initially the way I was thinking about it is we, scored them. We total up all of their passes and then we get a percent passing of all the things that they, that were applicable. So if something's not applicable because they don't have that component, then obviously we're not taking points away from it.

and my thought was, I just wanna know who does everything. Perfectly, or when they build something, it is perfect. So the highest of pass, just looking at passes would tell me it is perfect. Now that said, I've thought a little bit more about this and I think next year we might try and do more waiting.

One of the things that we could do a little differently, and this became more apparent when we added more builders, because there's a middle section. Where a whole bunch of builders are only separated by one percentage

[00:32:37] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Yeah.

[00:32:39] Amber Hinds: or in one case, it's less than a whole percentage point, and they're ranked in that way.

But if I had waiting, we might have a better understanding. It's possible one that was down low would actually move up, because they might've done better at some of the more serious issues. So I think, next year I might rethink that. I, it is more, it makes my Google spreadsheet have to have way more complex formula logic, which I might have to ask my partner Chris to help me with because

[00:33:11] Nathan Wrigley: I don't think there's a, there's definitely no perfect way of scoring this, but I, think that's a fair, that's a really decent place to put your flag in the sand. Everything gets a point, and some things will definitely be skewed, but they're skewed for everybody.

Everybody gets the same skewing, so it's

[00:33:25] Amber Hinds: They get the same sku. Yeah, I do. I do think I definitely can make the concern be a half point next year. That will be really easy for me to do. What will be more complicated is if I go through each item tested and assign a severity rate. I think I know how I can do that if I were to add a column so I can calculate

[00:33:45] Nathan Wrigley: do you have or have had thoughts about the a scoring for things like how straightforward it is? for example, if a particular plugin makes the, I don't know, let's say there's some area label or something like that, it surfaces that and gives that real priority. It's easy to find in the interface.

It's not buried within a menu, In other words, it's there, but heck, nobody's gonna find it. I, did wonder if any of that is incorporated into it. okay, you've got it, but boy is it hard to, use with your particular page. But I didn't know if any of that might be creeping in at some point.

[00:34:21] Amber Hinds: So that is some of the concerns where things like that, like talking about forms. There was one, and I don't know if I'll remember off the top of my head, but there was one where the way you added. The labels two fields, you actually had to add a separate component. So it wasn't like most form builders, when you put a field in the page, there's like a thing where you fill in and you say what the label for the field name is.

but in this one you had to put in the input and then you also had to insert a label element. You had to know to do that. And also, I think we called out that their documentation says this is optional, which is not

[00:35:05] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah.

[00:35:06] Amber Hinds: It is not optional to label your field, but they're all like, you could just use the placeholder instead.

I'm

[00:35:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So some of that

[00:35:13] Amber Hinds: So technically it was possible for all of the fields to be labeled, but because of their documentation and the way they were built, we gave them a concern because I'm like, they're basically making people think you don't need to do this.

[00:35:27] Nathan Wrigley: So let's move on to the components that you tested. So obviously, page builder A is gonna ship with a different set of components to page builder B, but certainly what I'm looking at the moment, the following things were tested, navigation, header search. Accordion, carousel or slider. That's an interesting one.

I bet. I bet that was, oh bet that was fun. forms icon list. Loop post block tabs and testimonials. So a fairly constrained list of things. I imagine a lot of these page builders also have a myriad arrangement of other, but they're They, represent the basics of what I imagine most of them would have.

how did you come about deciding on those then? Was it simply that they were ubiquitous? They were pretty much a straightforward bet that each one of them would have those.

[00:36:14] Amber Hinds: So it's more about what components do I most commonly see on professional business

[00:36:22] Nathan Wrigley: Got it. Yep.

[00:36:24] Amber Hinds: And we had been building websites for 10 years, right? More than 10 years at this point. And, it was what did we always need? we always had accordions, we always had tabs. We, didn't always have carousels.

But the weird thing is. People like them. And so it was like, okay, I gotta test that. Last year I didn't include forms and I didn't include forms because I personally feel pretty strongly that you should just use a form plugin because your form plugin is gonna do better than any page builder at creating, giving you all the options that you need to build amazing forms that do really cool things.

But I added forms this year because a lot of these tools now that they've introduced are added forms. And they have these starter templates. of course they're putting the form on the contact page, and the reality is, if a non-technical user is, for example, taking Elementor, using an Elementor theme kit to get started on their website, then just going through and changing content, hey, there's already a contact form on the contact. Why would they, if you're a non-technical person who doesn't understand, why would you be like, oh, I'm not gonna use this. I'm gonna go buy a form plugin, or find a free form plugin, right? Like you're just gonna be like, oh, it's already here and it's already asking for all the things I want, like their name and email address and phone number and the message they were gonna send me.

So I'm

[00:37:45] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. A lot of,

[00:37:46] Amber Hinds: So I realized that as much as I don't want page builders to have forms, I had to test them. Because the reality is, that's what's gonna stay

[00:37:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the, templates and increasingly the, I'm sure we could have a whole other episode about this, the increasing use of AI to create boilerplate. websites as well. They often drop in, the, form solution that comes with this particular, page. But, and it, it's there, it looks fine.

I, I asked for a contact page, so I got a contact page. There it is. And it'll probably function and, given that's what's happening. Yeah.

[00:38:22] Amber Hinds: that is one of those ones too, especially where, like I'll say this Spectra blocks, it looks like those are labeled fields, but they don't actually use a label tag. So all of the fields in that form. Are totally not labeled, but unless you're somebody who truly understands HTML or accessibility, like it looks labeled and you've given it a label on the backend.

and so this kind of goes back to my whole, like I was, I need to add this because I also want page builders to feel a little bit of pressure to I need to fix this issue. That is really a major critical blocker for people with disabilities. Because a lot of non-technical people aren't gonna know that it's a problem.

[00:39:14] Nathan Wrigley: So also the, another thing that you were testing for, so that we just described, the components that you used, the, ones that I just mentioned, but also, there's a section here called accessibility Ready Requirements. And I'm just gonna read the paragraph because I, confess, I'm not really sure what.

This is, we also tested for, and this is underline, so it must be a link, I'm guessing, WordPress accessibility ready requirements. I'll put that in the show notes so you can follow up with that following the new process soon to be introduced on wordpress.org. This includes looking at many parts of the site control by the.

Theme and assessing. And then I'll just do the top three or four here. Skip to content links, landmark roles and names, keyboard navigation, support controls with accessible names, roles, and states. And then there's about, I would say about another dozen more. what is that part that, that didn't, I didn't make the mental connection there.

What? What's that bit?

[00:40:07] Amber Hinds: On wordpress.org, if you go to the theme section. There is a filter where you can filter the free themes that are available as accessibility ready, and the accessibility ready tag on wordpress.org is not one that a theme is supposed to just apply. Like they can give any other tag that they want to show up in the theme directory, but that one, you actually have to request permission to use the tag.

And when you request permission, someone on the. Accessibility team actually does a manual audit of your theme for specific requirements. The accessibility ready requirements are, have been in the process of being updated. I will fully admit that I am the delay on publishing them,

[00:40:55] Nathan Wrigley: I wonder why

it's not like you're

[00:40:58] Amber Hinds: on, wordpress.org. but they should be out very soon. But. Yeah, that's, so that's what this is, those have gone back to 2014. Joe Dolson wrote the original ones. And then, over the last year, he and I, and a myriad of amazing human beings who came to accessibility tables at various word camps, word Camp us, word Camp Canada, two word, camp Europe's.

Have looked at them and helped us to create new guidelines, and I've been overhauling the testing process to make it easier for anyone to do The theme developers can also test their own stuff more easily and know what they're supposed to do. So the, I use the new testing process that we are going to publish very soon on wordpress.org to also test.

The builders, and what we haven't said yet is that these builders, sometimes they are a theme, but a lot of times they're a plugin. And so when we set up the website, we also installed a companion theme if one was available. So for example, the example Elementor was tested with

[00:42:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:42:11] Amber Hinds: so they were only scored if the theme on the website was one that the company could control.

So there's a few where. They, we kept them with 2025, and if there were elements coming out of 2025, they didn't get a pass. If it passed, they also didn't get a fail if it failed. Like they, we would just say, okay, that's ignored because they literally didn't have a theme. WP Bakery would be one like that.

It's a plugin only. They don't offer a theme. They say you can use it with any theme.

[00:42:44] Nathan Wrigley: So

if, if it

[00:42:45] Amber Hinds: so that's why we did the theme. Tests because they were themes that were made by the same company and are promoted as, you should use this with

[00:42:53] Nathan Wrigley: Got it. Got it. Okay. So in the case of, I don't know, let's say Beaver Bill, that it has a theme, presumably because it's got a theme, it's gonna benefit from some aspect of the work that's been done on that theme. But if there's no, if there's no theme, then you go for a default WordPress theme 2025 in this case.

Got it. Okay. Again, that makes sense right now to the results. Now this is gonna take me a little while, but I'm gonna do it. 'cause I think it's important. I'm gonna go through the list of all the tables just because I'm just gonna read what the table's title is and then you can go through and explore.

So the first one is page builder navigation accessibility. That is followed by page builder header search accessibility, then page builder accordion accessibility. And I'm gonna stop saying page builder. carousel sliders accessibility, form accessibility. Then we've got icon list, accessibility loop posts, block accessibility tabs, accessibility testimonials.

I'll stop saying accessibility at the end as well. skip links. Landmark, keyboard navigation. Names, accessible names, roles, and states form field labels heading structure, link underlines text. Sorry, link text. Default color contrast image. Accessibility animations. reflow, that's an interesting one.

Context change, accessibility. New link tab warnings, hover focus, content accessibility, and, That's it. I think I've got through them all. so there's a lot. There's absolutely tons. And each one of those represents its own table with, in many case, dozens of different, tests going on. I dunno how many data points you've got here.

You could be, be into the multiple, thousands. but at the end, as described out, pops out a score. this is the, moment of truth. who won, who came out on top?

[00:44:55] Amber Hinds: So Cadence came out on top with both the Cadence theme and Cadence block, and they got a 100% score. Now we can say, and I have this note on here as well, that Cadence and their parent company Liquid Web, has been working with us for more than a year to make. All of their WordPress plugins more accessible.

and the liquid web website we did auditing for, I, they're very committed to accessibility over there. So they have been putting effort in. They didn't get a 100% last year, but they did get a 100% this

[00:45:31] Nathan Wrigley: okay. That's, a fair enough caveat and I think it would be remiss of you not to mention it, but also, they employed a, an expert because they wanted to improve their product, and it's not entirely. that's just what you'd hope, right? You'd hope that it would certainly go north and, so Cadence came out with a hundred percent.

I, like I said, that's to be expected. I'll just go through the top few. So first cadence a hundred percent, then it was generate blocks and generate press. So those two things combined. Then grade, which I think I know is grade suite, G-R-E-Y-D. Followed by Elementor, followed by Green Shift, beaver Builder Breakdown Bricks, site Origin, page Builder, and then in 10th place, ASRA Spectra.

And, then we go from 11 to 19, and I won't actually go through all of those. so when you, say that Cadence came out with a hundred percent, with all the caveats that you mentioned there, i is it like, are you basically saying that Cadence is, literally perfect or is it just it managed to.

Surpass everything on your test. I, don't quite know what that question means, but are there things that, if you'd widened the search, you could have disrupted on all of them. It wouldn't be like, cadence is a hundred percent all the time, forever and ever are men.

[00:46:48] Amber Hinds: So what is important to understand about this report is it is not a comprehensive accessibility audit of every component in these tools. there, as you mentioned earlier, we looked at maybe what, eight or 10 different blocks or widgets, whatever the builder calls them. but many of these have 25, 30.

Blocks or

[00:47:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

[00:47:16] Amber Hinds: so would the numbers change if we looked at everything? oh yeah. For sure. I think this order would definitely change, if we expanded scope. the other thing that we didn't look at is the admin or the editor experience, which I know to some degree can be a little frustrating to some of our friends in who are blind and use WordPress because this is only a front end

[00:47:47] Nathan Wrigley: a whole other survey. Amber. Oh,

[00:47:50] Amber Hinds: Yes, if I were gonna do a backend audit to tell you if you're a blind person and you wanna choose one of these tools, what is going to be the easiest for you to use? That would be a whole different test, and it might have very different results. Now, I will say I have a couple of blind friends who use Cadence, so I think cadence is usable, in the admin as well.

But I haven't fully tested it, so I can't speak to, That, I would say any of them that are block based are probably going to have a more accessible

[00:48:26] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. Okay.

[00:48:28] Amber Hinds: than the ones that have created their own editor experience. That's not guaranteed because of course, if they've built their own editor experience, they can have done a lot of accessibility testing.

As part of their editor building process, but I think it's probably less likely. Whereas anything that relies on the core builder is going to benefit from all of the work that folks like Joe Dolson and Andrea and Alex Stein and some other people have done in core accessibility.

[00:49:02] Nathan Wrigley: you made like a broad.

[00:49:04] Amber Hinds: that's something to

[00:49:05] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. You, encapsulated it somewhere on the page here, and although again, you can't map this to everything, it, boils down to if it's newer, it, has a, higher likelihood of scoring higher. There's a whole lot of legacy. Yeah. Is that about right?

[00:49:25] Amber Hinds: A lot of the, yeah, so Divvy is pretty old. And they were third from the bottom. They have a legacy code base that they're dealing with. I know I actually opened an issue for WordPress core and, I about the ad media button that shows up if you're in the classic editor.

Or, some other scenarios right above the, editor itself, that little ad media button. And, I opened an issue last week and I was like, Hey, this doesn't have Aria. It has popup dialogue to tell a blind person that it's gonna open a modal. And, Joe, and everybody's okay, when was the problem added?

So he's like going back and he like, I don't know why, I guess it's important. So he's tagged. Okay, here's the, issue. When this became a button. Because it used to be like a link or something coded not properly and they fixed it to be a button. and he's I don't actually think Aria has popup existed when this was made into a button.

Like the, spec, the HTML, the aria, like the, Building bones that we use to code things also evolves and changes and so an older tool, if they're not paying attention and they're not evolving their tools, then they could have a lot more problems because it's possible they might have been built before some of this Aria spec even existed.

[00:50:55] Nathan Wrigley: I suppose that sort of is a neat segue with the things that you do at Equalize Digital. the re, again, forgive me for saying this on your behalf, but I'm guessing that the reason that tools like Cadence. Did do very well is because they have hired somebody who's made it their mission in life to, to understand this stuff.

And it's not everybody's mission in life. if you're a software developer, if you're building a page builder, your job might be just to get the page builder out of the door and market it and what have you, and be successful at shifting units of that product and not necessarily thinking about these bits and pieces.

And I can understand there's a connection there, With that, I'm gonna recommend that if you've, if you're a page builder of a page builder, why not get in touch with Amber and, and equalize digital? And there may very well be work. Maybe they are all already doing that, I would've thought anyway.

But, the other thing to mention of course, is that just because, your page builder or thing of choice. Came high on this survey, it doesn't mean that you are automatically going to build a perfect website that then still needs a, fair level of expertise and understanding how the tool implements things and accessibility rules and stipulations and guidelines in, in more general detail.

So that's a an interesting point to mention as well, just because it, scores highly here doesn't mean you are going to deploy a perfect site because you use that tool, I guess is worth mentioning.

[00:52:27] Amber Hinds: Yeah. The best way I would say that is you wanna think about these tools as their percent of accessibility readiness. It's the same thing as themes on wordpress.org. We don't say that they're accessible themes. We say that they are accessibility ready, meaning they're not likely to. Add problems for those specific things.

But you as a site owner or developer still have to keep things in mind. You have to choose colors for color contrast. You need to enter your content in an accessible manner. you need to, spend time thinking about. How people are gonna interact with the website and what the UI needs to be. And even if you choose the most accessible stack of plugins, if the content is going in poorly, then it won't matter.

You could still have a very inaccessible website.

[00:53:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. And, we are in the era where accessibility is not just a moral compulsion, it's also. Increasingly a legal compulsion over in the part of the world where I live. We've got the European Accessibility Act, and I think in, the part of the world where you are, there's legislation, which I dunno if it has an equal clout, but over here there's quite a lot of teeth behind the European Accessibility Act as well.

So very important work to be done. I think probably at 50 minutes we've probably reached the sweet spot of where we need to get to, hopefully. Dear listener, the idea of this is that you. As you go to the website, the link will be in the show notes. If you go to wp builds.com, search for the episode with Amber Hinz on it.

I can't at the minute say what number that will be, but go and search for the episode with Amber Hinz in and and hopefully you will then open up this wonderful document, which is a real labor of love. and go and explore, see all of the criteria and, make your own conclusions and, purchase accordingly.

So unless there's anything else you want to, oh, actually, yeah, why not? Let's just offer up. Where can we find you? whether that's a URL or a contact form or an email address or whatever.

[00:54:32] Amber Hinds: So on social media, I am most active on X, and you can find me there at hey Amber Hines. Otherwise, our website of course is equalized digital.com and there is a contact form that you can use there as well.

[00:54:44] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much. Amber, it's been a pleasure chatting to you today. Thank you for explaining all of that, but also thank you for doing it, necessary work and, and I'm, very appreciative. Thank you very much indeed.

[00:54:56] Amber Hinds: Thank you for having me.

[00:54:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's all we've got for you this week. Very nice to have you with us. I hope that you enjoyed that chat with Amber.

If you did, head to wpbuilds.com, search for episode number 440, and we would love it if you leave us a comment there. That would be so, so nice. We love the WordPress commenting system, and it would be really nice to have your opinions on this particular subject. In this case the WordPress page builder accessibility study. Very interesting conversation indeed.

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