This is the last part of the series. We have been through contrast, alt text, focus, keyboard order, forms, motion and heading structure. The problem is that you cannot check all of it from scratch on every screen.
The answer is to split the work in two: hand the mechanically decidable part to a tool, and spend human attention only on what needs judgement.
What automated checking does and does not do
On the right, tools are faster and more accurate than any person. On the left, a pass proves nothing. An alt attribute containing a file name passes the check. A contrast calculation is only certain on a solid background; over a photograph a person has to look.
So it is better not to read automated results as a score. Passing means no mechanical defects, not that the thing is usable.
Fifteen human minutes — four moves
Tabbing through checks the focus indicator and the movement order at once. Reuse the five-line checklist from part four.
Zooming to 200% shows what disappears when text is enlarged or the window narrowed. Horizontal scrolling, overlapping text and fixed elements swallowing the viewport all surface here.
Skimming the headings checks whether the hierarchy works as a table of contents. If the heading list alone tells you roughly what the page says, it passes.
Reading without images is how you check what the alt text really says. If the paragraphs still hold together, the alt text is good; if nothing remains, it needs rewriting.
Check templates, not pages
A site may have two hundred pages but usually only about ten templates. Checking per template means one fix lands on every page that uses it. Checking per page means finding the same defect two hundred times.
Rather than keeping this as a separate accessibility document, fold it into the design QA checklist you already run. A separate document is the first thing dropped when a deadline arrives; four extra lines on a list already in use are not.
Closing the series
One thread runs through all eight parts: none of this is compliance paperwork. Legible text, a visible cursor, predictable movement and an error message you can act on are all design quality, and getting them right benefits every visitor.
WordPress is a perfectly good tool for doing all of it — the theme and the templates are in your hands, and the markup structure is yours to decide. What causes trouble is never the tool; it is time that has accumulated without anyone touching the site.
If you would like the markup structure, performance and security of a live site sorted out in one go, our optimization program handles it as a single job, and the order in which we diagnose and verify is published step by step on the process page.