Most case studies on this page begin with someone else’s website and our audit report. This one is different: Anandodhara is a complete accessible WordPress website that we designed and built from scratch, and then tested the way we test everything — with real assistive technology. Anandodhara (“The Stream of Joy”) is a Bengali cultural organisation in Sydney, Australia, serving its community for 29 years with Bengali books and magazines, cultural events and a warm little world around them.
The brief was simple to say and heavy to build: one accessible WordPress website for everything the organisation does — an online bookshop of 889 Bengali books and magazines, an events calendar, a community forum, donations, a photo gallery and a podcast — where every page works equally well for screen-reader users, keyboard users and low-vision users.
Table of Contents
Why accessibility matters for a cultural community hub
Anandodhara’s community includes elderly readers, first-generation migrants and members who met computers late in life. Many of them open the website on a phone — some with TalkBack or VoiceOver switched on, some with large text and heavy zoom. For a cultural organisation, accessibility is not a legal checkbox; it is the difference between a member joining the next adda and quietly giving up. So this site was not remediated into accessibility afterwards — it was born accessible.
Scope and standard
The whole site was built to WCAG 2.2 AA from the first day. The foundation is our own Ariade accessible block theme, carrying Anandodhara’s cream-and-charcoal design through a site-specific child theme. The moving parts — the hero carousel, events, testimonials and login — are our own WordPress accessibility plugins, running here as real production examples rather than demos. WooCommerce powers the bookshop, bbPress powers the forum and GiveWP handles donations — each one restyled and corrected until it passed the same tests as the rest of this accessible WordPress website.
How we built the Anandodhara accessible WordPress website
- Design first in Figma, then our Ariade block theme with a child theme — semantic landmarks, skip links, visible focus rings and reduced-motion support from day one
- Our own accessible plugins for the moving parts: a hero carousel following the W3C carousel pattern (Pause control, arrows, dots and polite slide announcements), events with schema.org structured data, testimonials and a hardened login
- A WooCommerce bookshop of 889 Bengali books and magazines with accessible product cards, filters, cart and checkout
- Screen-reader testing with JAWS and NVDA on Windows, VoiceOver on macOS and iOS, and TalkBack on Android
- Keyboard-only passes, Colour Contrast Analyser checks and 400% browser-zoom testing on every template
- Automated audits with Deque axe, Google Lighthouse and WAVE — the home page ships with zero WAVE errors and a 9.9/10 WebAIM score
What accessibility means on each part of the site
A cultural hub is really six small websites living inside one accessible WordPress website, and each part carries its own accessibility duties:
- Bookshop — product grids announce the title, price and availability, and filtering, cart and checkout work start to finish on a keyboard
- Events — every event carries structured data (dates, venue, organiser) for rich results, and the news timeline reads naturally in a screen reader
- Community forum — bbPress rebuilt with labelled topic cards, reply forms and keyboard-friendly pagination
- Donations — the donation form is fully reachable, operable and announced, so supporting the organisation never needs sighted help
- Photo gallery — filterable photo grid with an accessible full-screen viewer: arrows, a filmstrip, announced captions and Esc to close
- Hero carousel — auto-rotation with a real Pause button and live slide announcements, honouring prefers-reduced-motion
None of this is decoration. These patterns are the reason an accessible WordPress website earns a community’s trust: people stop worrying about the website and simply read, shop, talk and give.
Outcome
Anandodhara went live as a born-accessible WordPress website, not a patched one. A member using JAWS or NVDA can browse all 889 books and finish checkout, a keyboard user can join the forum adda, and a low-vision reader at 400% zoom can follow an event and donate — all without asking anyone for help. Launch checks show zero errors in WAVE with a 9.9/10 WebAIM score and a clean axe report, and the same care is baked into every future page through the theme and plugins underneath.