Gallery Pro should NOT be considered an Accessible theme

[Vanderbeam]

Howdy: first time/long time.

This is a warning for others and a suggestion to StudioPress.

The company I work for strives to put out completely accessible designs; as exclusively Genesis users, I applaud StudioPress' contribution to our efforts by supplying beautiful and accessible themes that give us amazing groundwork. This is the first time I've come across this issue when exclusively using themes categorized as accessible.

I realize accessibility is still something most of us are learning about and total conversion can be tough, but if a theme is going to be categorized as "Accessible," it should be accessible. Especially in cases someone who is looking for an accessible theme off-the-rack and doesn't have the knowledge to retrofit it.

In the case of Gallery Pro, it's a beautiful theme and certainly has accessible features (some ARIA and skip-to links); however, it's the stylesheet that falls short. It required over two hours of combing through and modifying it (like adding focus and focus-within pseudo-classes since it only uses hover), in addition to QA to ensure it was all dealt with. Navigating this theme via keyboard is near impossible out-of-the-box (the sub-menu doesn't even appear).

While our company never uses a theme's native colours, it's also worth it to mention the default accent colour (#91C3BA) only has a 1:95:1 contrast ratio to white; this falls WELL below the minimum 4:5:1 contrast ratio requirement to be accessible. This is, of course, an issue for someone (let's say a small business who can't afford a developer and doesn't know anything about development themselves) who loves the theme as-is and is depending on it being accessible since it's categorized as such. In all likelihood, a user like this won't be super educated on accessibility, they only know their website should be because someone told them they could be sued if they don't have an accessible website. And now they're risking their livelihood because they think this theme qualifies.

I'm not here trying to gripe or overly critical - as I mentioned previously, I love StudioPress and this is the first time I've come across an issue like this. I also know Gallery Pro is a third-party theme. I just thought it was important to bring up and think that it would be wise for StudioPress to pull this theme from their Accessibility category, at least until the original author of this theme can put out a new version that includes the required pseudo-classes and selectors that would truly make this theme accessible.

[David Vogelpohl]

Hello @vanderbeam. I work for StudioPress / WP Engine. Thanks so much for your feedback and suggestions on Gallery Pro. I'll pass this post / feedback along to the engineering team for review for future updates to GP 🙂

[billybohm]

Thank you for posting about Gallery Pro. I wish I could figure out what's going on with the Blog Page. It now displays the post image above the Blog Post, so now I have 2 duplicate images, 1 above the post and the one that's inside the post.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
https://alpineartinc.com/blog/

Thank you,
Billy

[AnitaC]

@utrealtr Design by Bloom provides support for their themes here - https://designbybloom.co/contact/. Reach out to them and I'm sure they can help you with any issues you have. They may have a solution available for you.

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