The RFP question is one line: describe how your website conforms to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Someone on staff forwards it to whoever built the site, and the answer that comes back says the theme is accessibility-ready. That sentence goes into the response. It has been going into responses for three years.
It has always been a weaker answer than it sounds. At the end of this month it may also stop being a true one.
Where this comes from. The tag, the review program and the September 30 deadline are documented on the Make WordPress accessibility team's own blog. The dispute over what happens on October 1 is quoted from the comment thread on that same post. The compliance dates further down are from ADA.gov. We have not predicted the outcome of the dispute, because nobody currently can.
What the Tag Actually Certifies
The accessibility-ready tag is a label in the WordPress theme directory. A volunteer team reviews a submitted theme against a checklist, and if it passes, the theme carries the tag. That is the whole mechanism, and it is a genuinely useful one for the narrow thing it does.
What it assesses is the theme's own templates and markup, at the moment it was reviewed.
Here is what it has never assessed, and this is the list worth putting in front of whoever wrote the RFP answer:
- Your content. Your headings, your link text, your color choices, your alt text, your tables.
- Your PDFs. The library of board minutes, standards documents and conference programs that nobody has opened in a screen reader.
- Your plugins. Every form, slider, calendar, map, video embed and chat widget added after the theme was installed.
- Your member portal. The pages behind a login, the join and renew flows, and anything rendered by your AMS rather than by the theme.
- Anything that happened since the review. A theme reviewed in 2023 carries a 2023 assessment, against the checklist as it stood in 2023.
Which produces the situation this post is about. A theme can carry the tag while the site built on it fails a keyboard test on the first page a member visits. The tag is not wrong about the theme. It was simply never a statement about your website.
The Part That Is Genuinely Unresolved
On July 23, 2026, the accessibility team extended its re-review deadline and wrote, plainly: “On October 1st, any theme that has the accessibility-ready tag and has not requested a re-review will be de-listed.” Theme authors have until September 30 to request that review.
Then the plan was contradicted from the top. On August 1, in the comments of that same post, Matt Mullenweg wrote that the initiative is “permanently delayed” and said the team had overstepped its authority. Joe Dolson replied that the program has always been fully voluntary and that the team would continue as planned. Nothing published since has resolved it.
We are not going to tell you which way it goes. So the honest position, as of today, is that the team's stated plan says de-list, the project's lead says it is halted, and no one has retracted anything. We are not going to guess which way that lands, and you should be careful with anyone who does.
What De-listing Would and Would Not Do
The word sounds more alarming than the mechanism is, and the distinction is worth having before it reaches a board.
What it would not do. Nothing changes in the theme's code. Nothing changes on your website. Your installation keeps working and keeps receiving updates from its author. A de-listed theme becomes invisible to somebody browsing the directory for something new to install, which matters a great deal to the theme's author and almost not at all to an organization already running it.
What it would do. It removes the thing you were pointing at. If your accessibility statement names the tag, or links to the theme's directory page as evidence, the claim in your document outlives the basis for it. That is the worst of the available outcomes, because nothing breaks and nobody notices until the sentence is quoted back to you by somebody who checked.
Why the Outcome Does Not Change What You Should Do
This is the useful part, and it is the reason the dispute matters less than it looks.
If the tag survives October, citing it in an accessibility statement still means offering a volunteer review of a theme as though it were an audit of your website. If the tag disappears, you have been citing something that no longer exists. In both branches the sentence in your RFP response is unsupportable, and in both branches the replacement is the same.
Procurement has moved in this direction anyway. Buyers increasingly ask for measurable evidence of conformance rather than a claim of it, and a directory badge was never going to survive that question from a prospect's counsel.
How to Find Out Where Your Theme Stands
Three questions settle it, and only the third one requires asking anybody:
- Is your theme a WordPress.org directory theme at all? A great many association sites run a commercial theme or a bespoke build. If yours does, it never carried the tag, none of this applies, and you can stop here — though the accessibility statement question below still stands.
- If it is, does its directory page carry the tag right now? If the tag is on the page today, it is there because of a review that has already happened, against the checklist in force at the time.
- Has the author requested a re-review? Under the team's stated plan that request is the single fact that determines what happens on October 1, and it is not visible from the theme's page. Your developer or agency can find out; the theme's author is the one who has to file it.
The Dates That Actually Bind You
None of the obligations below mention a theme tag, and none of them moved because of this dispute.
- ADA Title III — There is no deadline because the obligation is already in force. This is the exposure that produces demand letters.
- April 26, 2027 — Public entities with a population of 50,000 or more, extended by the Department of Justice's interim final rule of April 20, 2026. Entities under 50,000 and special district governments have until April 26, 2028. If your material still carries an April 2026 date, it is out of date.
- May 11, 2027 — Recipients of HHS financial assistance with 15 or more employees, which catches a great many nonprofits who do not think of themselves as federal grantees.
One standard, throughout. The technical standard across all of them is WCAG 2.1 Level AA. That has not changed, and WCAG 3.0 remains a working draft that binds nobody.
Let Us Replace the Sentence
Two documents are enough: your accessibility statement, and the accessibility language from your last RFP response. You get them back marked up. Which claims in them are supportable and which are not, what your theme's tag status actually is today, which of the three regimes above applies to your organization, and a draft paragraph to replace the badge that will still be true after your next redesign. If your statement already rests on findings rather than a tag, that will be a short letter and we will say so.