Whoops! It looks like your website is currently password protected.

@oldrup, I’ll look at making that notice dismissible. As for why it’s showing is because the plugin isn’t able to access the frontend of your website to scan the HTML for accessibility issues. Having password protection enabled or a maintenance plugin is usually the issue but it can be other things like security plugins or the PHP function file_get_contents being blocked at the server level. Do you have a security plugin like iThemes Security Pro installed?

Just gave it another go, as I suspected that drafts or private posts might be unavailable to Accessibility Checker, but sadly no luck.

• No password protection on any content.
• Had Wordfence installed, but temporarily deactivated it – no change.
• No drafts or private posts inaccessible on the front end.

I’ve been using Accessibility Checker for quite a while, since I appreciated it keeping an eye on me forgetting an alt-text, or naming all my buttons “download” – but this nagging is new and too much.

Please let me know if I can do anything to help to get to the bottom of this. I really appreciate what you are doing, and that you are sharing your work with the community.

@oldrup did you clear your cache after deactivating Wordfence?

Would you be able to provide a list of all the active plugins on your site?

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by Amber Hinds.

Cache cleared, and this time I disabled all the plugins I could, without breaking the front-end, meaning caching and security plugins were disabled, cache cleared.

Active plugins during this test:

Accessibility Checker Version 1.3.11 by Equalize Digital |
BlockMeister Version 3.1.7 by BlockMeister |
Classic Widgets Version 0.3 by WordPress Contributors |
Clean Image Filenames Version 1.4 by Upperdog |
Code Snippets Version 3.2.2 by Code Snippets Pro |
Getwid Version 1.8.2 by MotoPress |
Loco Translate Version 2.6.3 by Tim Whitlock |
Polylang Version 3.3.1 by WP SYNTEX |
Simple Custom CSS and JS Version 3.41 by SilkyPress.com |
Simple Local Avatars Version 2.7.1 by Jake Goldman, 10up |
The SEO Framework Version 4.2.7.1 by The SEO Framework Team |

I’d be happy to do dig deeper to see if I can find anything conflicting with Accessibility Checker – maybe on a fresh installation.

I’m suddenly getting this alert, as well. We use iThemes security plugin. Surely we don’t have to disable security to run an accessibility test? Is it still able to run, or is there something we need to whitelist?

@oldrup If you have access to another install on the same server you could check to see if the issue is there as well. It’s may be an issue at the server level. You could contact your host to see if the PHP function file_get_contents is being blocked.

@stephud, iThemes can block Accessibility Checker from scanning the site if Ban Users is enabled. You can read more about it here https://github.com/equalizedigital/accessibility-checker/issues/66#issuecomment-1366885412

Also, we’ve had reports that Disable PHP in Plugins can cause conflicts as well. Read more here: https://github.com/equalizedigital/accessibility-checker/issues/66#issue-1466642207

Marking this as resolved due to inactivity. If you require additional help please open a new support thread.