Accessibility Helper

Description

Accessibility Helper is a WordPress plugin designed to make your website more accessible for everyone. It provides an easy-to-use panel that lets visitors adjust font size, switch to a dyslexia-friendly font, hear image descriptions read aloud, and apply color schemes for common types of color blindness — all with customizable colors and styles to match your site’s branding.

Features

• Font Size Control: Visitors can scale text up or down for better readability.
• Readable Font: Switch to the Open Dyslexic font for easier reading.
• Image Alt Text Reader: Hovering over images reads out their alt text.
• Color Filters: Apply brightness, contrast, saturation and hue color filters, by using the sliders. Adjust to the users own preference.
• Color Blind Modes: Apply contrast schemes for Protanopia, Deuteranopia, Tritanopia and Achromatopsia.
• Fully Customizable: Adjust button colors, text colors, and panel position.
• Remembers Preferences: Uses localStorage to remember user settings.
• Lightweight: Loads only what’s needed, and works on any theme.
• Keyboard Shortut: Pressing ALT, SHIFT and A will open the panel.

How It Works

• The plugin wraps your page content in a container that scales with the font size controls.
• The panel is positioned in one of four corners based on your admin settings.
• The dyslexic font is loaded via internal files.
• For screen readers and visual aid, the alt text reader uses speechSynthesis to speak out image descriptions on hover.
• Color blind schemes are applied using the different sliders that adapt your theme for color blindness.
• There is a color contrast validation to ensure that there are no contrasting colors whilst customising the plugin between the background color, button color and text color.

– First time load up, a notification pops up that mentions about using keyboard shortcode to access panel.

Requirements

• WordPress 5.0+ recommended
• jQuery must be available (most themes already include it)

Known Limitations

• The image alt text reader relies on the browser’s speechSynthesis API — supported in most modern browsers but not all.
• The plugin applies a page wrapper (#accessibility-page-wrapper) for scaling — very rare conflicts could occur if your theme or other plugins rely on the same ID.

Developer Notes

• Settings are stored in the WordPress options table.
• User preferences (font scale, readable font, color blind mode, alt reader and color sliders) are saved in localStorage for persistence.
• Styling is handled with a separate style.css file — feel free to customize it further.

Support

If you find a bug, have a feature request, or need help, feel free to reach out to [will_reekie@icloud.com].

Credits

Open Dyslexic font by Abbie Gonzalez
jsDelivr

License

This plugin is released under the GPLv3 or later.

Happy building a more inclusive web!