Joomla Accessibility: The Results of Milestone 1a

Accessibility is one of the central goals of Joomla's current development programme. As part of the accessibility project funded through the Sovereign Tech Fund, Joomla is working on improving accessibility across the CMS in a structured, measurable way.

The first milestone, Milestone 1a – Expert Audit and Baseline Metrics, was designed to establish the foundation for everything that follows.

Rather than starting immediately with individual fixes, the project first needed to answer some fundamental questions: Where does Joomla currently stand? Which accessibility barriers exist? How serious are they? How can improvements be measured? And how should accessibility testing be performed consistently throughout the remainder of the programme?

To answer these questions, Open Source Matters commissioned an independent expert audit by Axess Lab, with the evaluation conducted by accessibility specialist Eric Eggert in July and August 2026.

An independent look at Joomla

The original scope of Milestone 1a called for an independent WCAG 2.2 AA and ATAG 2.0 audit of Joomla's administrator interface and default frontend template. The audit was to combine manual and automated testing, expert testing with assistive technology and user testing of core user journeys. The audit covered a representative selection of Joomla functionality, including:

• the Atum administrator template
• the Cassiopeia frontend template
• authentication and multi-factor authentication
• the Media Manager
• the Joomla installer and update process
• backend list views and editing forms
• frontend user forms
• configuration and permissions

The audit was deliberately broader than simply running an automated accessibility checker. Automated tools can identify many types of accessibility problems, but they cannot determine whether a complex interface can actually be used effectively with a keyboard or a screen reader.

Axess Lab therefore combined manual inspection, automated testing, expert assistive technology testing and user testing.

42 WCAG issues identified

The WCAG 2.2 AA audit identified 42 accessibility issues:

• 4 critical
• 15 serious
• 16 moderate
• 7 minor

In addition, one best-practice recommendation was recorded.

The audit evaluated 27 WCAG success criteria as failed, while 17 passed. Eight criteria were considered not applicable and three were not tested.

It is important to put these numbers into context. The audit report explicitly notes that, despite the number of findings, the result is better than average for a project of Joomla's complexity. There are areas where accessibility has clearly received significant attention already, while other areas require substantially more work.

The purpose of the audit is therefore not to declare Joomla "accessible" or "inaccessible". Instead, it provides a detailed and independently produced picture of the current state and identifies where improvements are needed. It also provides test protocols, automation scripts, and acceptance criteria that will make the tests repeatable, so that we can easily compare before and after test results.

Where are the biggest problems?

Several findings stand out because they can prevent people from using Joomla at all.

One of the most significant areas is the Media Manager. The audit found that important visual information is not consistently available programmatically, keyboard navigation is inconsistent, and elements do not always expose the required roles, states and accessible names.

The extension list is another major problem area. It cannot currently be operated effectively using the keyboard, creating a significant barrier for users who cannot use a mouse.

The audit also identified an issue where the editor can disappear while scrolling on small viewports. This is particularly relevant for people with low vision who may use a small viewport on a large screen to enlarge content.

Other important findings include inaccessible tooltips, insufficient focus indicators, problems with keyboard interaction, low colour contrast, inaccessible calendar controls and problems with dialogs returning focus to their triggering element. These are typical issues for a product of Joomla’s complexity.

These are not isolated cosmetic issues. They affect fundamental ways in which people navigate, understand and operate Joomla.

Keyboard accessibility is a recurring theme

One of the clearest patterns in the audit is the importance of keyboard accessibility.

A number of Joomla interfaces work reasonably well when operated with a mouse but become significantly more difficult when navigating with the keyboard.

This includes the backend list views, editing forms, the Media Manager and the extension installer. Drag-and-drop operations, filters, tooltips, dialogs and other interactive components can create additional barriers.

The findings demonstrate why accessibility cannot be reduced to checking whether an element has the correct ARIA attribute. An interface can have technically correct markup and still be difficult or inefficient to use.

This is particularly evident in the ATAG evaluation.

Joomla as an authoring tool

Joomla is not just a website that needs to be accessible to visitors. It is also an authoring tool used by people to create and manage content.

For this reason, Milestone 1a included an audit against the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0.

The ATAG audit found that Joomla performs relatively well overall, but identified five issues:

• inefficient keyboard access
• no apparent auto-save functionality
• frontend editing does not respect dark mode
• no coherent accessibility documentation
• no accessibility checker available in frontend editing

Of these, the lack of coherent accessibility documentation was classified as critical.

The keyboard issue provides a good example of why ATAG is important. In the Joomla editing interface, keyboard-only users may have to navigate backwards through a large number of controls to reach the toolbar and save or cancel their work. While Joomla provides keyboard shortcuts, these shortcuts are not sufficiently discoverable and do not cover all toolbar functionality.

The ATAG audit therefore extends the accessibility discussion beyond the question "Can a visitor use a Joomla website?" to another equally important question:

Can people with disabilities use Joomla itself to create accessible content?

Establishing a measurable baseline

Finding problems is only one part of Milestone 1a.

One of the most important outputs is the baseline measurement against which future progress can be evaluated.

The project combines automated testing with user testing. Automated tests use the Joomla Accessibility Checker and axe, and user testing was done with four on defined user journeys. Each journey was evaluated according to whether it could be completed independently, completed with friction, completed using a workaround, or could not be completed.

The initial results show a significant variation between the journeys.

The user testing also produced Accessible Usability Scale (AUS) scores of 35, 73, 28 and 50 for the four participants.

These numbers are not intended to be a universal "Joomla accessibility score". Their real value is that the same methodology can be applied again later.

That makes it possible to ask a much more meaningful question at the end of the programme:

Did Joomla actually become more accessible?

From an audit to a development roadmap

Milestone 1a was intentionally designed as a foundation milestone.

The original RFP required not only the audit and baseline metrics, but also reusable accessibility test protocols and acceptance criteria for the milestones that follow.

These protocols have now been published together with acceptance criteria for common components. They are intended to make accessibility testing repeatable and to provide a common basis for evaluating future work.

This is an important change in how accessibility work can be approached in Joomla.

Instead of treating accessibility as a series of individual fixes, the project now has:

1. an independently produced assessment of the current state;
2. a documented list of concrete accessibility issues;
3. baseline measurements;
4. defined user journeys;
5. reusable testing procedures; and
6. acceptance criteria that can be applied to future work.

The results can also be consumed in different formats, including JSON and CSV exports suitable for issue-tracking workflows such as Jira and GitLab.

What happens next?

Milestone 1a does not fix the issues it identified. Its job was to establish the evidence and methodology needed to fix them effectively, and to verify that they have been fixed.

The next step is therefore to turn these findings into a remediation plan and development work.

The audit gives the Joomla project a much clearer picture of where to concentrate its efforts. Some issues will require changes to Joomla's JavaScript components and interaction patterns. Others involve templates, colour contrast, focus handling, forms, documentation or content practices.

Most importantly, future work can now be evaluated against a defined baseline rather than relying on assumptions or anecdotal reports.

A transparent process

The complete results of Milestone 1a are publicly available on the Joomla Accessibility Project website.

View the complete Milestone 1a results →

The published material includes the full WCAG 2.2 audit, the ATAG audit, baseline metrics, user-testing guidance and results, as well as the accessibility test protocols and acceptance criteria.

The detailed reports intentionally retain the technical depth of the original audit deliverables. This makes them useful not only for project management and reporting, but also for Joomla developers, accessibility specialists and contributors who want to understand exactly how individual findings were identified.

Milestone 1a is therefore more than an accessibility audit. It is the baseline against which the Joomla Accessibility Project can measure its progress over the coming milestones.

The findings show that Joomla has a solid foundation in several areas, while also making clear where significant barriers remain. The next phase of the project is about turning this knowledge into improvements — and measuring whether those improvements make a real difference for people using Joomla.