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Ghost Accessibility:
Making Publications EAA-Compliant

Theme fixes, content habits, and membership-flow checks that bring a Ghost site up to WCAG 2.2 AA — without rebuilding it.

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Updated August 2026 · Reading time: 6 minutes

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Ghost and the EAA

Ghost runs newsletters, paid publications, and membership sites — exactly the kind of services the European Accessibility Act covers when they operate commercially in the EU. Since 28 June 2025, e-commerce-like services and consumer-facing digital services must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust (the four WCAG principles). For a Ghost publisher that means the theme, the article content, and crucially the signup and checkout flows all need attention. The good news: a modern Ghost install has fewer moving parts than most platforms, so reaching WCAG 2.2 AA is genuinely achievable.

Theme Level Checks

Most Ghost accessibility problems live in the theme, not the core. Work through these:

Colour Contrast

Many magazine-style themes use light-grey text on white or text over gradient hero images. Body text needs 4.5:1; large headings 3:1; form inputs and icons 3:1. Fix in the theme CSS or custom settings once, benefit everywhere.

⌨️ Keyboard & Focus

Test tabbing through header navigation, post cards, and the member portal. Dropdown menus and card overlays are the usual traps. Ensure :focus-visible styles exist and are clearly visible.

Images & Cards

Post-card thumbnails rendered as background-image divs carry no alt text. Prefer img elements fed from the post feature image, with meaningful alt text inherited from the post.

Typography & Zoom

Verify the layout survives 200% browser zoom and 320px width without horizontal scrolling (WCAG 1.4.10). Fluid type systems in newer themes handle this well; older ones break.

Structure

One h1 per page (the post title), logical heading levels inside articles, a skip-to-content link, and a proper lang attribute set by the theme.

Koenig Content Habits

Ghost's Koenig editor produces clean HTML by default — better than most rich-text editors — but authors can still create inaccessible content:

Alt text: the image card prompts for alt text but nobody is forced to fill it. Make it an editorial rule: every informative image gets descriptive alt text; decorative images get explicitly marked as such.

Embeds: YouTube, Twitter/X and other embed cards inject iframes you do not control. Give embed cards a preceding sentence that describes what the reader will see/hear, since iframe content is opaque to your own markup.

Heading discipline: writers coming from Word use bold text instead of headings. Screen-reader users navigate by heading lists — an article with no real h2s is unnavigable.

Link text: avoid bare "here" and "this article". Link text should survive being read out of context.

Galleries and captions: ensure gallery images each have alt text, not just a collective caption.

Membership Flows

This is the part unique to Ghost and easy to miss. Signup, login, checkout and account-management pages are user journeys, and under the EAA a payment flow that cannot be completed by assistive technology users is a compliance failure — not just a WCAG nitpick. Check that: email input and error messages are properly labelled and announced (error text associated with the field via aria-describedby); the Stripe checkout Ghost hands off to is configured with accessible branding settings; magic-link emails have meaningful link text ("Open your login link", not just "Click here"); and the member portal renders usable with keyboard alone. Test the full journey yourself with a screen reader once — it takes twenty minutes and reveals more than any automated tool.

Verification Loop

A repeatable QA loop for a Ghost site:

1. Automated scan of home, a tag page, a full post, /#/portal and signup pages. Static scanners catch the mechanical layer fast — expect them to find contrast, alt-text, and heading issues on the first run.

2. Keyboard pass through nav, post list, article, comments (if enabled), and the complete signup-to-checkout journey.

3. Screen-reader sample: one article start-to-finish with VoiceOver or NVDA, plus the signup flow.

4. Statement: publish an accessibility statement with conformance status, known limitations, and a contact channel. Commercial publishers in scope of the EAA should have this visible from the footer.

5. Regression habit: re-run the automated scan after every theme update or new release — themes change more often than people expect, and regressions are silent.

Going Deeper

Start with a free automated scan of your Ghost site — it finds the mechanical WCAG failures (contrast, missing alt, heading order, unlabelled buttons) across all your key pages in one run.

Scan Your Ghost Site Free → WCAG 2.2 Guide →

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the EAA really apply to newsletters and blogs?

If the service is consumer-facing and commercial — paid subscriptions, e-commerce of digital products — yes. Free personal blogs generally fall outside the EAA, but WCAG-compliant publishing costs little and protects reach; there is rarely a reason not to fix the basics.

Is Ghost itself accessible out of the box?

Ghost core is reasonably solid: clean HTML output, labelled portal components, decent defaults. The dominant sources of defects are third-party themes and author content habits, which is why theme review and editorial rules matter more than platform choice.

My theme has no focus styles. Quick fix?

Yes — add :focus-visible { outline: 2px solid currentColor; outline-offset: 3px; } in Code Injection. It respects the theme palette and restores visible keyboard focus site-wide in one line.

Can I automate Ghost accessibility checking?

Partly. Automated tools catch roughly 30-50% of issues — contrast, missing alt, structure, labels. Keyboard operability, meaningful alt descriptions, and embed accessibility require human review. Combine both: scan automatically after each theme change, review manually per release.

Does fixing accessibility help SEO?

Several accessibility signals overlap with SEO: proper heading hierarchy, descriptive link text, alt text, fast semantic HTML, mobile-friendly layouts. Accessibility work tends to improve crawlability and rankings as a side effect, though it should be done for users first.

Scan Your Ghost Site Free → WCAG 2.2 Guide →

Related Guides

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Dansk version: Ghost og tilgængelighed: gør publikationer EAA-compliant