WP Accessibility version 2.1.0 has just been released, and it includes a major new feature: statistics collection. WP Accessibility does a lot of different things: automated repair to issues on your site, a toolbar with high contrast or font size toggles, and controls to make alt text and descriptions visible for your images.

What it doesn’t have is a high level of visibility into what it’s doing. If you have a high level of understanding of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and scripting, you can figure out what’s changing – but for most users, it’s not very obvious.

Note: you will only get a full picture of WP Accessibility’s actions if you turn on all front-end features available in WP Accessibility. The items in the ‘Testing and Admin Experience’ section are not tracked.

What WP Accessibility Collects

First, the statistics collection is very private; no personally identifying information is collected. WP Accessibility uses <strong>fingerprinting</strong> to identify a browser signature that it will use to identify specific behaviors by a user, but does not store anything other than the fingerprint key.

Page Views

By default, page view statistics are only collected when a user with administrative privileges browses the site. This can be changed in the settings to collect stats from all visitors or none.

Page view statistics aren’t tied to specific users; they only collect the manipulations that WP Accessibility has performed on that page.

WP Accessibility stores view data on the initial page load, then again only if the results are different from the previous stored data.

User Actions

User actions are associated with the current user, based on the fingerprint assigned for that user. Again, no personally identifying information is associated with this user.

An action includes enabling or disabling high contrast, viewing the alt text on an image, or using other WP Accessibility features that require user interaction.

Each change is recorded in statistics, allowing you to see how often users take advantage of these features.

Why?

The point of a plugin like WP Accessibility is to be used as a stop gap until you’ve fixed your site’s accessibility problems. But how do you know whether you still need it if you don’t have insight into what it’s doing?

Statistics tracking is intended to help you know which features are useful for you. If you’re finding WP Accessibility doing a lot of work, you should invest in more extensive exploration of accessibility fixes. I recommend Accessibility Checker by Equalize Digital (affiliate link), as a powerful tool to identify what you need to do to fix your website’s accessibility.