Making your Divi website accessible is not only a step towards inclusivity but also aligns with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), ensuring your site is usable for everyone, including individuals with disabilities.
With the future release of Divi 5, we're set to enhance the theme's accessibility features alongside other key updates. We'll focus on WCAG compliance, improving keyboard navigation, ARIA support, focus indicators, and alt text management, all while introducing performance boosts and new design tools.
For the current version of Divi, version 4, you can leverage two popular Divi Marketplace products, "Accessibility Bundle" and "Divi Assistant" to improve your website's accessibility:
Divi Assistant
Divi Assistant offers the "Accessibility Helper" suite that can significantly improve your website's compliance with WCAG guidelines:
Keyboard Navigation: One of the key features is the ability to make Divi elements focusable, allowing users to navigate your site using just the keyboard. This is crucial for those who cannot use a mouse, ensuring they can interact with your site's menus and content through the "Tab" key.
ARIA Support: By adding Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) attributes to Divi modules, you enhance how assistive technologies like screen readers interpret your site's interactive elements. This feature helps in providing context to users, making navigation and interaction intuitive.
Visual Focus Indicators: The plugin adds visible outlines to elements when they receive focus, improving the experience for keyboard users by clearly indicating which element is currently selected.
Alt Text Management: Divi Assistant also includes options within its Media Helper to manage and apply alt text to images, which is essential for describing images to users who rely on screen readers.
Decorative Icon Accessibility: You can set icons as ARIA hidden if they are purely decorative, ensuring they do not confuse users of assistive technologies.
Accessibility Bundle
The Accessibility Bundle consists of a collection of tools aimed at various aspects of accessibility:
Accessibility Sidebar: allows website visitors to customize your Divi website appearance for improved accessibility based on their individual needs and preferences.
Accessibility Attributes: lets you add essential attributes to Divi sections, columns, rows, modules, and individual HTML elements to improve website accessibility for visitors who rely on assistive technologies.
Accessibility Tweaks: automatic adjustments to your Divi website’s modules and HTML elements to improve navigation and accessibility for all website visitors.
A Note on a Free, Third-Party Solution: Divi Accessibility
There's also the Divi Accessibility plugin, which was specifically designed to improve accessibility compliance of the Divi theme but is no longer actively developed. While it offers some benefits like inline script and style enqueuing, focusable modules, and ARIA support, its lack of updates means it might not cover all aspects of modern WCAG compliance or fix newly discovered issues. We advise approaching this option with caution, considering its development has ceased.