You may have seen websites with buttons called “Accessibility” or with an icon of a person in a wheelchair or an icon based on the Vitruvian man. Or, yet again, you may have never noticed them because they are sometimes quite hidden. We will call them here “accessibility overlays”.
When you click on one of these buttons, it generally opens a panel with a lot of options to, amongst other things, customise the website’s appearance: increasing text colour contrasts, increasing font size or line height, stopping animations, etc.
On the web, these buttons are becoming more and more present. They are said to be “web accessibility solutions” or “digital accessibility solutions” that make websites accessible or even conform to accessibility standards and therefore to the law.
There’s a lot of blame on these tools. Some people need arguments, sources when it is suggested to them to install this kind of tools instead of implementing a global accessibility approach for a website. I think it is therefore necessary to take stock of the subject to know where we go.
Continue reading « Web accessibility overlay tools: lies and gum balls »
