Improve accessibility of a website

For differently-abled people it is quite complicated to access content on the Internet. To improve this the W3C consortium issued a recommendation called WCAG - Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/">recommendation </a> defines 3 priority levels of the recommendations: [Priority 1] A Web content developer must satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it impossible to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint is a basic requirement for some groups to be able to use Web documents. [Priority 2] A Web content developer should satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will remove significant barriers to accessing Web documents. [Priority 3] A Web content developer may address this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it somewhat difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will improve access to Web documents. However a lot of websites does not fulfill even the Priority 1 recommendations. We want to find a client-side solution for altering of such pages for the people with special needs.

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Submitted by Lukas Kavicky on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 19:41
1 answer

Use of Greasemonkey to fix the accessibility issues

With use of the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox we are able to alter any page with accessibility issues (and even do much more). Greasemonkey allows the user to customize the way a webpage is displayed using JavaScript. There is even a lot of scripts for various sites available at http://userscripts.org/ .

To fix the issues you need to:

  1. Download Greasemonkey: https://addons.mozilla.org/sk/firefox/addon/748/
  2. In the 'Tools' menu item you have to enable Greasemonkey and then click on 'New user script'
  3. In the 'New user script' dialogue fill in the name of the script, the namespace of the script, its description and the sites is should run on ('Include rules') and which pages the script should not be started on ('Exclude rules' , typically * for all other pages). Click on 'OK' button.
  4. Now you default text editor appears and you can write you script. Note that Greasemonkey generated a header for you script containing the name, namespace, etc. If you want to change these values later, you should do it in the header but also in the 'Tools>Greasemonkey>User scripts management'
  5. Now you can alter the website using standard DOM functions of the JavaScript. Here is a small example:

    //Adding alt text to the main banner
    var titleimg = document.getElementById('title-img');
    titleimg.alt = "ACME, Ltd.";
Submitted by Lukas Kavicky on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 20:04

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