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Democratizing Accessibility: Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker

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Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker is an accessibility testing plugin that scans pages and posts for accessibility problems and puts reports in the WordPress admin. It was a winner of a 2023 Gaady award for its innovative approach to improving accessibility (fellow winners were Unilever and Studio 24), and is used by enterprise organizations, educational institutions, small businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies around the world, including NASA and The US Department of Veterans Affairs, among others.

Accessibility Checker was created to make it easier and more affordable for everyone to identify accessibility problems on their website. Competitor solutions rely on API connections and charge per page and per scan, frequently costing tens of thousands of dollars per year. This can easily put accessibility testing out of reach for many website owners. Equalize Digital came up with an innovative way to run accessibility scans on the website’s own server, within WordPress. The free, open source version available on WordPress dot org doesn’t limit the number of posts or pages that can be scanned, allowing even very large websites to start finding and fixing accessibility at zero cost. In this way, Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker is democratizing accessibility.

Laws around the world are increasingly requiring accessibility for websites of all types. Accessibility Checker is an ideal tool to showcase as it can help website owners better comply with these laws. Showcasing it may also attract more enterprise organizations to WordPress, as NASA stated that Accessibility Checker was a major contributor to their decision to use WordPress as the CMS for their new website.

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