How to Improve Divi Theme Accessibility – Tutorial

Please note: This article is intended for informational use only and should not be considered legal advice. For complete accessibility compliance of your website, I recommend consulting with a lawyer.

I believe I won’t be lying if I say that the popularity of the Divi theme and its page builder in the WordPress ecosystem is playing a significant role. I am myself a big fan of Divi and have been using it for more than 10 years already. And I’m even more excited about the features that the Divi 5 release will bring us.

In this article, I would, however, like to talk about the accessibility of the Divi theme or how you can make your Divi website accessible.

Understanding Web Accessibility Standards

Web accessibility standards make sure that websites on the Internet can be used by people with disabilities too. The most popular guidelines are the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) created by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).

The main principles of WCAG are that websites must be perceivable, which includes providing alt text for images and captions for videos. The websites also need to be operable—navigable by anyone—which means, for example, that the websites can be navigated by keyboard. The content should also be understandable and robust (compatible with available technologies).

There are also many other web accessibility requirements for different countries across the globe. They include, for example, the European Accessibility Act in the EU, or the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) in the US.

Make Your Divi Website Accessible

To ensure that your Divi website complies with the accessibility guidelines, you should make sure to apply the following principles:

• Choose the right Divi modules. Avoid using, for example, sliders.
• Install the right plugins. Make sure that a plugin that you install on your Divi website won’t harm your accessibility.
• Don’t forget to display your site title and tagline.
• Use proper heading tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.) in your HTML markup.
• Add alt text to your website’s content images. You can do this automatically with AI using my tool Imagerr AI (I’m the founder of this tool). Descriptive alt text on your images is good for SEO as well. Note that decorative images in your header or footer may not need alt text.
• Make sure you use legible fonts and use legible color contrasts too.
• If you use any forms, they should be accessible.
• Use descriptive anchor text for your hyperlinks.
• If you use popups, accordions, or carousels, make sure that they are accessible as well.

Accessibility & SEO

I’d like to point out that if you make your website accessible, it will also be good for your SEO at the same time. Because, basically, the principles for good SEO apply to a good accessibility score and vice versa.

And if you don’t know what SEO is, I will try to briefly explain it to you here. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it can help you bring more free traffic to your website from search engines like Google.

Tools for Improving Accessibility

There are many tools that will help you improve your accessibility score, but I will mention here just 2 that are helpful, particularly for Divi.

The first one of them is my tool Imagerr AI, which I have already mentioned in this article. It can help you generate alt texts (and titles, captions, and descriptions too) with AI for your media library images. It works with other themes and page builders than just Divi too.

The second one is the Accessibility Helper feature of the Divi Assistant plugin. You can buy this plugin on the Elegant Themes Marketplace. This plugin is very helpful, and it may help you with many things.

More Resources for Divi Accessibility

In case you are looking to find out more about the Divi accessibility topic, I recommend you check out these two following articles:

• How to Make Your Divi Website Accessible by accesiBe
• How to Improve Divi Accessibility by Pee-Aye Creative

I took some inspiration from both of these two articles for my article. They go into more details on this topic, so if you are looking to deep dive into it, feel free to check them out. In the second one, the one by Pee-Aye Creative, it is nicely explained which exact features the Divi Assistant plugin brings in for your Divi accessibility. I have not gone into much detail about this in this article.

Conclusion

There are many benefits of having an accessible Divi website. And it may not be only the SEO advantage, but I believe that your website might start getting traffic from AI tools like ChatGPT, SearchGPT, Google Gemini, and others too.

And according to WHO (World Health Organization), there are around 1.3 billion people around the world that have disabilities. This currently makes every 6th person on the globe. So, I believe you should definitely make your website accessible to these people as well.