Re: accessibility toolbar

Here we go again! Yet another accessibility overlay/toolbar trying to make
money out of unsuspecting website owners, purporting to solve disabled
peoples' problems and at the same time make your website magically
accessible to all and (more dangerously) pretending to make your website
safe from lawsuits when it does nothing of the sort! I suppose these tools
cannot necessarily be classified as a scam (though that might depend on
exactly how the various overlay/toolbar makers word their claims about
their tool), but they certainly don't do much good either.

The first thing for all website owners to understand about these things is
that the average internet user visits dozens of websites a week, maybe
hundreds if they are a prolific surfer. Of all these websites, less than
0.001% have an accessibility toolbar. So what do disabled people do on all
those other websites that are not so blessed?

If the disabled person needs a large font size, they have already set it in
their browser settings. They don't need this toolbar! If they need a black
cursor, they have already set it in their their operating system's
settings. They don't need a toolbar! If they need large text spacing, they
have probably obtained one of the many plugins that do that. If they need
different fore and background colours, they have set that in their
operating system. If they want a different font.....but you get the picture.

The other thing all website and app owners must understand is that just
giving users the ability to change font size, or cursor colour, or zoom
settings etc etc does NOT change the inaccessibility of your website to
most disabled people one whit. It will still contravene the law, and still
present major barriers to most disabled people, particularly to blind
screen reader users who cannot benefit from most of the functions in this
toolbar anyway - not even from the lists of headings and links and so on
since their screen readers already do that for them. So every website still
has to be audited and updated to fix all the accessibility issues they
invariably have.

Mind you, the makers of this toolbar have one good thing going for them.
They offer an accessibility audit and ask for their money up front. I so
wish I could get my clients to pay me beforehand!

Regards,
Guy Hickling
Accessibility Consultant