Accessible WordPress Themes
Website Accessibility concerns are on the rise both locally to Sonoma County’s small business owners and other well-known businesses nationwide.
In our dedication to making websites more accessible to users with disabilities, Boylan Point’s web development team has recently attended seminars and workshops on the topic of ADA Compliance.
During our research, we found 19 free WordPress themes deemed accessibility-ready by WordPress.org and wanted to share them with you.
What does accessibility-ready mean exactly?
Since WordPress.org provides a short and sweet answer, I’ll just quote them below.
“Themes labeled as accessibility-ready have met the required guidelines and should not be construed to meet any level of formal accessibility requirements. Those levels are measurements of content accessibility, and cannot be applied to a theme.”
Not all WordPress themes go through this accessibility-ready process.
Theme submissions (or theme updates) using the tag must undergo a basic accessibility review.
This means you can trust the below accessibility-ready themes for WordPress to help build a foundation for your ADA compliant website.
Aaron
Theme Reviews: 4.8 out of 5 (14)
Authored By: Poena
Active Installs: 900,000+
Last Updated: March 17, 2019
Notes: Aaron is a responsive, accessibility-ready multi-purpose theme. Features include a call to action and front page highlights that will grab your visitor’s attention, helping you to feature different products and services of your company.
Apex
Theme Reviews: 5 out of 5 (11)
Authored By: Ben Sibley
Active Installs: 2,000+
Last Updated: February 25, 2019
Notes: Apex is a sophisticated, minimalist theme. It looks great and performs wonderfully on mobile devices, tablets, laptops, and everything in between. Use it to set up a business blog, newspaper website, fashion magazine, or travel blog.
Author
Theme Reviews: 4.9 out of 5 (47)
Authored By: Ben Sibley
Active Installs: 4,000+
Last Updated: February 24, 2019
Notes: Author is designed for publishers who want readers. That’s why Author is fast, responsive, accessibility-ready, and optimally designed for reading. All scripts and stylesheets are minified, concatenated, and conditionally loaded to maximize performance.
Catch Box
Theme Reviews: 4.6 out of 5 (54)
Authored By: Catch Themes
Active Installs: 10,000+
Last Updated: January 22, 2019
Notes: Catch Box is a simple, lightweight, box-shaped and adaptable WordPress Theme for bloggers and professionals. It is based on HTML5, CSS3 and Responsive Web Design to view in various devices.
Chosen
Theme Reviews: 4.8 out of 5 (32)
Authored By: Ben Sibley
Active Installs: 4,000+
Last Updated: February 24, 2019
Notes: Chosen is a bold and minimalist theme for publishers who want to get their visitors’ attention and keep it. Present your best content in a simple, uncluttered fashion on phones, tablets, and desktop computers with Chosen.
Founder
Theme Reviews: 4.9 out of 5 (15)
Authored By: Ben Sibley
Active Installs: 1,000+
Last Updated: February 25, 2019
Notes: Founder’s minimalist design presents your content in a simple, clean, and professional manner. As a responsive theme, Founder is beautiful on phones, tablets, and laptops, and is optimized to load quickly on each.
Modern
Theme Reviews: 5 out of 5 (17)
Authored By: WebMan Design
Active Installs: 4,000+
Last Updated: April 10, 2019
Notes: Modern is an accessibility-ready blog and portfolio WordPress theme by WebManDesign, perfect for personal portfolios. Optimized for search engines, with responsive design, ready for mobile devices and high-resolution displays.
Neve
Theme Reviews: 5 out of 5 (84)
Authored By: Themeisle
Active Installs: 20,000+
Last Updated: April 22, 2019
Notes: Neve is a super fast, easily customizable, multi-purpose theme. It’s perfect for blogs, small business, startups, agencies, firms, e-commerce shops (WooCommerce storefront) as well as personal portfolio sites and most types of projects.
Period
Theme Reviews: 4.9 out of 5 (20)
Authored By: Ben Sibley
Active Installs: 1,000+
Last Updated: February 25, 2019
Notes: Period is a dark, clean, and SEO-optimized blogging theme. As a responsive theme, it displays your content beautifully across phones, widescreen monitors, and everything in between.
Reykjavik
Theme Reviews: 5 out of 5 (9)
Authored By: WebMan Design
Active Installs: 2,000+
Last Updated: April 7, 2019
Notes: Reykjavik is a fresh, lightweight, speed and SEO optimized, accessibility-ready WordPress theme perfect for your next business, portfolio, blog or WooCommerce e-shop website.
Shift
Authored By: Ben Sibley
Active Installs: 1,000+
Last Updated: February 25, 2019
Notes: Shift is a simple and customizable theme made for businesses and bloggers. Present your best content in a beautiful and responsive design across mobile devices, tablets, and widescreen monitors with Shift.
Storefront
Theme Reviews: 4.5 out of 5 (104)
Authored By: Automattic
Active Installs: 200,000+
Last Updated: April 26, 2019
Notes: Storefront is the perfect theme for your next WooCommerce project. Designed and developed by WooCommerce Core developers, it features a bespoke integration with WooCommerce itself plus many of the most popular customer-facing WooCommerce extensions.
Twenty Fifteen
Theme Reviews: 4.4 out of 5 (43)
Authored By: WordPress.org
Active Installs: 300,000+
Last Updated: February 21, 2019
Notes: This 2015 default theme is clean, blog-focused, and designed for clarity. Twenty Fifteen’s simple, straightforward typography is readable on a wide variety of screen sizes, and suitable for multiple languages.
Twenty Fourteen
Theme Reviews: 4.3 out of 5 (92)
Authored By: WordPress.org
Active Installs: 200,000+
Last Updated: February 21, 2019
Notes: This 2014 default theme lets you create a responsive magazine website with a sleek, modern design. Feature your favorite homepage content in either a grid or a slider.
Twenty Nineteen
Theme Reviews: 3.5 out of 5 (38)
Authored By: WordPress.org
Active Installs: 1,000,000+
Last Updated: February 21, 2019
Notes: This 2019 default theme is designed to show off the power of the block editor. It features custom styles for all the default blocks and is built so that what you see in the editor looks like what you’ll see on your website.
Twenty Seventeen
Theme Reviews: 4.5 out of 5 (104)
Authored By: WordPress.org
Active Installs: 1,000,000+
Last Updated: February 21, 2019
Notes: Twenty Seventeen brings your site to life with header video and immersive featured images. With a focus on business sites, it features multiple sections on the front page as well as widgets, navigation and social menus, a logo, and more.
Twenty Sixteen
Theme Reviews: 4 out of 5 (74)
Authored By: WordPress.org
Active Installs: 500,000+
Last Updated: February 21, 2019
Notes: Twenty Sixteen is a modernized take on an ever-popular WordPress layout — the horizontal masthead with an optional right sidebar that works perfectly for blogs and websites.
Twenty Thirteen
Theme Reviews: 4.1 out of 5 (62)
Authored By: WordPress.org
Active Installs: 100,000+
Last Updated: February 21, 2019
Notes: The 2013 theme for WordPress takes us back to the blog, featuring a full range of post formats, each displayed beautifully in their own unique way.
Unlimited
Theme Reviews: 4.3 out of 5 (15)
Authored By: Ben Sibley
Active Installs: 900,000+
Last Updated: February 26, 2019
Notes: Fast, responsive, beautiful, and accessible. With Unlimited, your content will reach more people, on more devices, around the world. Unlimited’s simple and dark design puts the focus on your content and supports it with clean, reliable code.
Want to learn how to make your company website ADA Compliant?
Email our web team or call our Northern California office at (707) 544-3390 today.