Curbcut for WordPress
A free plugin that scans your site, and applies the alt text from a fix pack directly into your media library. It adds nothing to the front end of your site and makes no outbound request.
Then Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin in WordPress. Requires WordPress 6.0 and PHP 7.4. GPLv2 or later.
What it does
Scans your pages
From Tools → Accessibility, it fetches your front page and your ten most recently updated posts and pages the way a visitor would — so what gets checked is what people actually receive, theme and plugins included — and reports the failures that show up most often in accessibility complaints: images with no alt text, links a screen reader cannot announce, fields labelled only by a placeholder, headings that skip a level. Each finding names the rule, the WCAG success criterion, the page and the markup.
Applies a fix pack
If you bought a Curbcut fix pack, upload its fixes.json and the plugin lays every suggested alt text beside the alt text you have now, image by image, with a thumbnail. Tick the ones you want. It writes them into the media library, so each image carries its alt text everywhere it is used and it survives a theme change.
There is deliberately no apply everything button. Alt text is a judgement about what an image means in the place it is used, and you are the one who can make that judgement — we can only give you a good first draft of it. Every batch records what was there before, so you can undo it, and an undo will never overwrite alt text you have edited since.
It is not an overlay
An accessibility overlay loads a script that patches your pages in the visitor’s browser. Your source never changes, the fix disappears whenever the script fails to load, and the page still fails a manual audit — which is why overlays are the subject of most of the accessibility lawsuits filed against remediation vendors, rather than the cure for them.
This edits your content instead. The alt text ends up in your database, in a field WordPress already has, readable by anything — including whoever audits you next. Then the plugin gets out of the way.
Your data stays yours
Everything runs on your own server. No page content, no URLs, no email address and no analytics are sent anywhere. There is no account and no API key. The pack file you upload is read on your server and nothing about it leaves. The plugin makes no outbound request except to fetch your own pages during a scan, and it adds nothing to the front end — no badge, no widget, no powered by link.
What it cannot do
The plugin reads your pages as HTML. It cannot see colour contrast, keyboard focus order, whether the site reflows on a phone, or what a screen reader actually says out loud. Those need a real browser, which is what the scan on this site does.
No automated tool can tell you a site is accessible. Roughly a third of the WCAG success criteria can be tested automatically at all; the rest needs a person. Anything offering you a certificate from a scan is selling something that does not exist. Every pack lists what still needs checking by hand.
Questions
Do I need to buy anything?
No. The scan is free and the plugin never asks you for anything. The apply screen is only useful if you have a pack, and it says so rather than nagging you.
Will it slow my site down?
No. It runs only when you press a button in the admin, and it makes no change to the front end.
Is it on wordpress.org?
Not yet. This page is where to get it in the meantime, and installing from a zip is the same three clicks. It is GPLv2 or later and the source is in the zip, so you can read every line of what you are installing.
Something went wrong
Email support@curbcuthq.com, or see support.