A basic list of buttons that may be used to improve your website accessibility
This plugin enables an A11Y Buttons block, which contains some common accessibility buttons that you usually find in a website’s top header. The idea is to provide a simple way to have them inserted in any part of your theme, without adding overlays and keep them fully customizable so they can match your design and still offer the required features.
The buttons available are:
All of the buttons have the following features:
We understand that accessibility is a huge topic and that no solution is perfect. We also are by no means “experts” on the subject, so if you have any critics or suggestions, please make contact!
Want to contribute? Great! Feel free to open an issue or make a pull request.
A11y Buttons plugin, Copyright 2022 wetah
A11y Buttons plugin is distributed under the terms of the GNU GPLv3
License details: https://github.com/mateuswetah/A11Y-Buttons/blob/main/LICENSE
A11y Buttons plugin bundles the following third-party resource:
Atkinson Hyperlegible Font Copyright 2020 Braille Institute
License details: http://brailleinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Atkinson-Hyperlegible-Font-License-2020-1104.pdf
Source: https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont
This section describes how to install the plugin and get it working.
e.g.
/wp-content/plugins/a11y-buttons
directory, or install the plugin through the WordPress plugins screen directly.To avoid conflicts that could break the editor experience, we opted to make the buttons interactive only on the published page, that is, outside the editor. This is valid for all the buttons, except for the Skip to link.
This plugin uses a strategy of updating the HTML root font-size only. This means that your fonts will only respond to changes if they are set in CSS relative units, such as rem
. Other plugins achieve scaling by an “opinionated” strategy of setting different font sizes to different elements in the inner HTML tags. While we would recommend you to work with relative units, we also believe it is valid to discuss that…
This is a valid discussion as nowadays, each Browser dedicated Zoom feature can handle scaling much better, no matter which CSS unit you are using. Often, if your site has decent mobile responsiveness, its layout will be nice in a Browser-zoomed scenario. However, one can argue that the fact that everything is scaled (including images) pollutes much of the relevant, readable content. In the end, it is a topic that we are not 100% sure about and would love to find more research related to it.
Skip links should use HTML anchor navigation, which is done via IDs. If the ID is not set in the code, you can configure it via a block. To set an anchor to a search bar, for example, select its block in the site editor and scroll to the Advanced section in the block settings tab. Most blocks have an area there to define an anchor. You can then define it as search-bar-area
and then type #search-bar-area
as your link in the button block settings.
Internally, the Skip to link button is an anchor (<a>
) tag, as its role is related to navigation. The other ones are actual <button>
tags as they perform actions and not as linking. You may use the block formatting and settings to make them similar to each other.
The plugin keeps track of font-size and contrast toggle state preferences across pages using sessionStorage. Make sure to warn your users if you feel that can be sensible.
Originally, we planned to have a simple feature to add accesskey
to each button. After reading this, we gave up.
Yes! If you have an image like a monochromatic logo that would make sense to be inverted, add the class a11y-invert-on-contrast-mode
to it so it can be inverted.
a11y-invert-on-contrast-mode
to images and figures that you wish to be have color inverted on contrast mode.