Accessible Social Sharing Plugin

By Anne-Mieke Bovelett on April 11, 2021
Status: Updated on March 7, 2022

Sometimes less is more!

At the time of this article being posted, the development team of Elementor had acknowledged that the native Share Buttons widget is was not yet fully accessible. I won’t get into technical detail here as to why that was.

The solution

I’ve started using a plugin called “Scriptless Social Sharing” by Robin Cornett. She did the world a huge favor putting it out there, free for all to use! And the best part: it’s accessible!

You can download Scriptless Social Sharing from the WordPress Plugin Repository.

One necessary minor tweak in your functions.php

On April 6, 2021, someone reported an easy to resolve accessibility issue: the links open in new windows without a warning. That’s not so good for accessibility.

A rule for accessible websites is to ensure that links or controls that open new windows or frames do not open without a warning. Robin gave the solution, providing a code snippet that ensures the link opens in the same window. That way the user can get back to the site, using the back button in the browser.

To make that work, you can either put the snippet she provided in the functions.php of your child theme, or use the (also free) Code Snippets plugin.

The snippet

add_filter( 'scriptlesssocialsharing_link_target', '__return_empty_string' );

Use in Elementor

If you use this in Elementor, please note that although in the backend only the colors of the icon background (I chose SVG) show, the icons do show up in the frontend!

To use it in Elementor, add it via the Shortcode Widget. The shortcodes are described here.

do you like the plugin? Buy the developer a cup of coffee!

When you go to the plugin page in the WordPress repository, on the bottom right (desktop) you will find a donation button.

Cheers,

– Anne