• I am going to create a website with WordPress; however, I am not sure which web hosting company to use. I am totally blind, and I use a Mac with VoiceOver. So, I want to make sure that the hosting company I choose has a control panel that is accessible with VoiceOver. Any assistance you can provide would be much appreciated.

    Thanks in advance for your assistance. I am looking forward to getting started with WordPress and to becoming a part of the WordPress community.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • bluehost give special package for wordPress. Godaddy is also but their backend very hard to manage. if you need shared hosting .
    we also provide shared hosting with cpanel, message me if you need hosting
    and before choosing hosting dont just check disk space, choose plan with good Bandwidth also
    thanks

    Go for Cpanel web hosting provider , with auto installer for wordpress will make your life easier to get wordpress installed with just a click of button.
    Also make user if read TOS of company you select to make sure what exactly you are getting at that price.

    Tim Nash

    (@tnash)

    Spam hunter

    While there are hundreds of hosts out there most smaller companies will be resellers and they will rely on stock web interfaces the most common cpanel and Plesk.

    These hosts will have a very similar experience and a quick Google it would seem both suffer from a plethora of accessibility issues. This is not to say that it would be insurmountable but may prove more complicated.

    Not all hosts use these software, and others will have a custom control panel unfortunate I couldn’t find a nice resource with a list of major hosts and how their control panels fair for accessibility but it would make a very interesting read.

    From my own experience working at 34SP.com who are a UK managed host we have clients using screen readers to navigate our control panel and have taken on board and made changes based on their feedback. Indeed even this morning a component was found to be confusing by a customer with a screen reader so is currently being relooked at. I suspect other companies with custom control panels do the same we are not unique.

    The good news, once you get to the point where you have WordPress installed life gets a little easier inside WordPress itself.

    At WP Engine, we adhere to web standards to help make our custom (see: coded from scratch, not cPanel or Plesk based) user portal accessible. We’re proud of the feedback we’ve received from customers so far, and do our best to stay on top of things.

    With that being said, I’ve run a few tests on our portal and see some definite places where we can improve, even at the A (and especially AA & AAA) conformance level. I’ll do what I can to make sure we improve there and continue to keep accessibility in mind moving forward.

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by Jason Cosper.
    Thread Starter jonathansimeone

    (@jonathansimeone)

    I want to thank everyone for their input. So far, I have contacted Bluehost and DreamHost. Neither of those companies knew whether their control panels are accessible. I have also tried several Internet searches in an attempt to find an article comparing the accessibility of different hosts. As of this reply, I haven’t found any information that seems credible. I really don’t want to sign up for something, find out it’s not accessible, and have to figure out where to move my site. So, I am truly hoping that those who use VoiceOver on the Mac and have a site will share their hosting experience with me.

    Jonathan

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    🏳️‍🌈 Advisor and Activist

    Speaking for DreamHost, we know ours isn’t great for accessibility. In our design meetings we’ve brought it up many times 🙁 But yeah, it’s not good, it DOES work, but it’s a bad experience. I’ll pass this post on to folks with a big “I TOLD YOU SO” finger waving though.

    A11y is important and sadly it’s been an afterthought to too many of us, and we need to change that.

    Hi @jonathansimeone and everyone else,

    Regarding accessible web hosting, No hosting provider at this point that I am aware of has a control panel that is WCAG compliant or accessible according to standards/best practices. That being said, Cpanel is useable, once you spend some time familiarizing yourself with the interface. Most hosts will use Cpanel. There are, however, some things you’ll want to avoid. PHPMyAdmin, (a database management graphical user interface), is completely unuseable with a screen reader at this point, and I’m not aware of anyone involved with that project who is working to make it accessible. PHPMyAdmin usually come standard, but there is a separate database manager you can use to create and delete databases. Anything involving database operations other than these you’ll either need to learn the command line for, or get someone to help you with. I personally use WPEngine, and their support staff is really good about helping when I run into an accessibility issue with their control panel. They’re a managed host, which means that they take care of a lot of the WordPress-specific security and maintenance for you. This can be a good thing if you’re just starting out. I use a managed host because of the convenience. If you go with a host that uses Cpanel, also avoid the file manager that’s built in. It’s almost unuseable. You’ll want to get yourself an FTP client.

    Hope this helps,

    Amanda

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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