Do You Use WordPress For Your Website?
As a marketing agency we use a lot of different website platforms on behalf of clients. I like WordPress the best. It’s clean, consistent, SEO-friendly, well-adopted and (generally) easily remediated when there is an accessibility issue.
I recommend it to all Mind Vault clients. Specifically, I recommend hosting your website with WordPress.com DIRECTLY. There are more advantages to this approach than I can name in this article. What’s the key difference? WordPress itself is open-source “software” (not hosting) that anyone can download and install for free. Think of it as the “app” that holds your website files and allows you to update them. You can host the WordPress app yourself by downloading it from WordPress.org and run the whole stack on any server you choose. This means that security, updates, backups, and uptime are all on you. Unless you enjoy complexity and discomfort for their own sake, I don’t recommend it.
Any hosting provider who is not WordPress.com is just using WordPress to sell their hosting. And their hosting of WordPress is NEVER (in my experience) better than the integrated experience that you get hosting directly on WordPress.com by Automattic, the company founded in 2005 that built and maintains the WordPress software along with Jetpack, WooCommerce, and Akismet. They handle the entire stack for you. In real time. Every single day. You do nothing but maintain your site. Same software, but the maintenance burden shifts from you to the people who make it. The most intelligent choice one can make, in my opinion, where software longevity is concerned.
It is here that we begin our tale of indifference and the circumstances that led me to create the Braillewright theme for WordPress in the first place. As well as my decision to give it away, completely free of charge, to anyone who wishes to use it.
What is a “Theme”?
In WordPress a theme attaches to your WordPress app and tells the app how your website should “look,” visually. So it is important to note here, up front, that the primary purpose of a theme for sighted persons specifically, is to provide visual structure to the WordPress app. To give the app a particular “look”. What sighted persons often do not know, is that the choice of theme also determines approximately 50-65% of the technical accessibility outcome. An outcome that is often completely invisible within the marketing that describes any particular theme.
Aren’t There Accessible-First Themes?
Yes there are. Both WordPress.com and WordPress.org offer a built-in theme directory of both free and paid themes. But you have to know the magic search term in order to get either directory to sort by accessible-first themes (we’ll define that in a moment). Why? Because there is no visible filter in the UI. Why? I do not know. But I will share the magic search term with you. It is: “Feature:Accessibility-Ready”. Paste that term, exactly as typed, into the theme directory search for either directory, and up will come a list of themes that have been deemed by WordPress.com or WordPress.org to be “Accessibility Ready”.
What Do “Accessible-First” and “Accessibility Ready” Actually Mean?
Let’s try to define “Accessible-First” and “Accessibility Ready.” From the official WordPress.com Theme Handbook: “Accessibility Ready does not mean the theme meets WCAG AA-level guidelines; it means the theme reaches the minimum standards the theme review team has set.”
Wow. That’s really insightful, isn’t it? It meets some unknown “standard” that their review team has set. Great. Here’s a bit more:
“Themes labeled accessibility-ready have met the listed guidelines and should not be construed to meet any formal accessibility requirements. WCAG is a measurement for content, and a theme is only a wrapper for your content, so WCAG does not apply directly to a theme. It is also an optional review stage. A theme that fails the accessibility audit is still approved for the repository; it just has to drop the tag.”
The moral of the story? Even using a theme deemed “Accessible-First” or “Accessibility Ready” does NOT ensure that users of assistive technology will be able to access your website. It’s just a better starting point than a theme that has given accessibility no consideration whatsoever. As is the case with many Pro WordPress themes today.
Real Accessibility Means Ongoing Remediation
In order for any theme to become truly “accessible”, it has to be tested. And not just once, but repeatedly and for the life of the theme, by both robots and humans. Across a range of assistive technology devices. Preferably one automated test per day, per device, by robots, and one per month, per device, by human testers. The software that underpins WordPress changes often. So too must the code in your theme if you want it to remain accessible. This is why the accessibility of themes in general is so poor. It requires an ONGOING COMMITMENT to accessibility to make a theme that is truly “accessible,” and doesn’t just carry a vague “we tried” tag.
Our Commitment To Braillewright
As of today, we (Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd.) have decided to make that commitment to the access technology community. And not just for the ongoing accessibility of the Top Tech Tidbits and Access Information News websites, but for ANYONE who needs real accessibility, but simply doesn’t have the time or money to remediate their own WordPress theme on an ongoing basis.
How the Braillewright Theme Was Born
Back in mid-2024 I located a theme for a client on the WordPress.com theme directory that was deemed “Accessibility Ready” and that I really liked the look of. The layout was simple and clean and the theme looked good with or without images. The base theme was free. You had to pay $50 USD per website to unlock its customizations. Which you really couldn’t use the theme without. This is standard practice in the theme world. Give away the base theme for free, and then charge for the customizations required to make it your own. Fine I thought. If it serves as an accessible start for a client that could not otherwise afford it, then $50 is definitely worth it. I installed the theme and paid the $50 USD for the “Pro” version, which unlocked all of the customizations required to reflect the client’s visual brand.
There is a quote that I keep at the bottom of every email I send:
“The greatest barrier to accessibility is indifference.”
I built out the site for the client and we began testing it. And guess what? Accessibility issue after accessibility issue kept surfacing. And it wasn’t our content. It was the theme. And we’re not talking about super technical stuff here. We’re talking about alt text for the hero image on the home page. It was completely missing. With no way to add it. So I reached out to the developer, who provides “support” to paying theme customers. I explained to him who my clients were (access advocates) and asked him if he might be able to make this change quickly. “No.” he replied, quickly and matter of factly. “But I will add it to the next update.” Okay. Great. I thought. “When is the next update?” I asked. “We do not update on a schedule. We only update once we receive enough updates to warrant a push.” Great. So here I was, at the mercy of a sighted developer who did not understand the importance of basic accessibility. You see? The greatest barrier to accessibility really is indifference.
After several more back and forths of this nature, I quickly realized that this relationship was not going to be sustainable. So I began to consider what exactly I could do to make it sustainable.
If You Want Something Done Right
I began this consideration as any engineer would. By taking a look at the code for the theme itself. Upon inspection I noticed something interesting. The theme was created under the GNU General Public License (GPL), which allows for the “free use, study, modification, redistribution or sale of the software, including modified and rebranded versions, provided the result remains under that same license and preserves the original author’s copyright.”
That meant that we could, technically, take all of the code for the both the base theme and the pro version, merge it into one theme so that users no longer had to pay for it, and then setup ongoing testing and monitoring of the new theme in order to keep it remediated on an ongoing basis. So that is precisely what we did. And in doing so, the Braillewright theme was born.
Why The Name “Braillewright”?
Because “wright” means “maker” or “builder” while braille is the language built by and for the blind, who will benefit more from the accessibility baked into this template than anyone else.
Made Possible By AI Engineering Assistance
This was only possible, today, due to the advent of AI. This project would have taken a team of developers weeks to complete prior to AI coding assistance. Shout out to Claude Code for making this project possible.
So What Now?
You can visit the official Braillewright WordPress Theme page here, where you can download the ZIP file and learn all about the functionality and accessibility behind the theme.
We have setup the new, always free, Braillewright WordPress Theme as a public Github repo which we will maintain going forward. We will remediate the theme on an ongoing basis (nightly by automation, per device, monthly by human tester, per device) and push updates to users, automatically, at no cost.
As of this writing, both Top Tech Tidbits and Access Information News are both running the new Braillewright WordPress theme. This theme works just as well with images as without, and still looks amazing. If you use WordPress, no matter who hosts it, you can install this theme at no cost.
The Moral of the Story
If you need a WordPress theme that looks good visually, with or without images, while being consistently remediated underneath, at absolutely no cost, Braillewright is now here for you.
Cheers,
” The greatest barrier to accessibility is indifference. “
Aaron Di Blasi, PMP
Engineer, Educator, Advocate, Publisher & Journalist
President & Sr. PMP, Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd., PR Director: AT-Newswire, Publisher: AI-Weekly, Top Tech Tidbits, Access Information News, Title II Today
Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd.
President, Sr. Project Management Professional (2006 — Present)
Innovative ideas. Solutions that perform.
Top Tech Tidbits
Publisher (2020 — Present)
The Week’s News in Access Technology
Access Information News
Publisher (2022 — Present)
The Week’s News in Access Information
AI-Weekly
Publisher (2024 — Present)
The Week’s News in Artificial Intelligence
AT-Newswire.com
PR Director (2024 — Present)
Access Technology’s Digital Newswire
Title II Today
Publisher (2025 — Present)
The Month’s News in Title II Compliance
PWD Media Co-Op
Founder (2025 — Present)
Amplifying Disability Voices Through Collective Reach
Connect With Me:
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