WP Accessibility – DocumentationNote: 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.
Disabling Statistics Collection
It’s really only important to collect statistics long enough to have a good idea what kind of actions WP Accessibility is taking on your site. To disable statistics collection, go to the WP Accessibility settings page and set “Page Statistics Tracking” to “None”.
