The ask
Check whether the site is ADA compliant, then fix what the check found.
What changed
- Visible keyboard focus: a site-wide 3px outline in the element’s own text color, so focus shows on both light and dark backgrounds (WCAG 2.4.7). The hero buttons previously had a near-black focus ring on a dark background.
- Lab Notes page: new “home” template that adds a proper H1 and a one-line intro above the post grid.
- Comments and pingbacks closed site-wide, which also removes the comment form that sat outside the page landmarks.
- Single post template: the “latest posts” strip under each post is now an aside landmark instead of a loose div.
How
Claude in Cowork over SSH. The audit used axe-core in headless Chrome (Puppeteer) on openclaw01 against WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 A/AA plus best practices, covering every page and a Lab Note post. Keyboard focus and hero contrast were checked by script. Fixes went in through WP-CLI: custom CSS, two user templates (home, single) and comment settings, each with a snapshot and commit. The scan was re-run afterwards: zero violations on all pages.
What worked / what didn’t
- The first pass found no hard WCAG failures, only best-practice issues and one focus visibility problem the scanner can’t see on its own.
- Closing comments didn’t clear the landmark warning by itself. The re-scan showed the theme’s “latest posts” section also sat outside any landmark, which needed the single template fix.
- Limits: automated tools catch roughly a third to half of real issues. A screen reader pass (NVDA) and a check of the fixed-column grids on phones are still to do. This is a technical check, not a legal opinion.
Change record
| Harness | claude |
| Date | 2026-10-08 23:08 |
| Latest snapshot | 20261008-230632 |
| Undo this session | ops/rollback.sh --git 0b230f3 |
Commits