Add accessibility to your website

This looks like a nice way to add some features to your website. But to all reading: Overlays are NOT the way to make your website accessible. They frequently do not work as intended, and sometimes even harm accessibility [0]. One particular overlay was so bad that it got sued under the ADA [1].

Unfortunately the only way to make your website accessible is to put in the work to make sure it complied with the standards. There’s lots of resources online for this. See [2] as a starting point.

[0] https://adrianroselli.com/2022/09/overlays-underwhelm-at-id2...

[1] https://adrianroselli.com/2022/03/faciliti-will-get-you-sued...

[2] https://www.accessibilitychecker.org/guides/wcag/

    increase text size 
    decrease text size 
    invert colors 
    gray hues 
    underline links 
    big cursor 
    reading guide 
    text to speech 
    speech to text 
    suppress animations 

1,2,5,10 are already features of the browser, 3 and 4 are easily accomplished with user stylesheets, 6 is an OS setting, 8 is what everyone using a screenreader already has, 9 seems like a useful addition, and I'm not sure what 7 is.

Toolbars are not the same thing as making your site accessible. In a lot of cases they simply replicate, poorly, that which is already provided by the browser and OS and don’t address fundamental problems like keyboard access and screen reader support. They are mainly a device to CYA.

https://overlayfactsheet.com/

I found this to be remarkable in terms of both user-friendliness and respecting fellow human being's comfort.

For a working functional demo example, check out the lower right-hand corner of this page:

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6652

(Start scrolling and the blue chair guy should appear)

People who need accessibility should have a tool like this automatically injected into all of their sites (since, even if you believe all sites should add this, many are simply not going to, so it will need to be injected anyways).

The real benefit IMO is if you can provide customization to the accessibility tool, so that a) they don't break your website, and b) you can add new custom tools if necessary. Without necessarily including the tool itself (though if you do need to include the tool to customize it that's ok).

Then people who inject your accessibility tool will get access to that customization, and it will provide them a greatly enhanced experience. And if enough people join and you're lucky, it can become standardized and widely adopted, like ARIA.

Maybe release it as an extension, so only people who need it can enable it for any website? Otherwise it's just another layer of "useless things to turn off", adding on already big pile of cookies consent, newsletter registration popups, notifications, etc.

Want this as a bookmarklet and/or extension. I’m betting it’s trivial but unfortunately I’m getting ready for a week of driving. If no one gets to it before me, I’ve got the repo started and I’ll gladly throw what I can together when I’ve got an idle moment for it.

Accessibility is a part of web standards, not something to add.

nice find! ;)