Widewalk – Accessibility Toolbar Wordpress Plugin - Rating, Reviews, Demo & Download
Plugin Description
Widewalk adds a small button to the corner of your site. A visitor opens it and sets your
pages the way they need to read them: larger text, looser lines, wider letter
spacing. Stronger link marks, a calmer palette, a bigger pointer, motion paused. Their choice stays in their own browser and changes nothing for anybody
else.
One switch turns it on. It works on the theme you already have.
A widewalk is a pavement built wide enough for everyone: the wheelchair, the
pushchair, the delivery trolley, and everyone walking beside them. That is the
idea. Widen the path rather than build a separate one.
Twelve controls, each a set of steps
Every control steps through its settings as the visitor presses it, and the
button names the setting in force — “Line Height (1.75x)”, “Align Center”,
“Low Saturation” — so nobody has to guess where they are.
- Bigger Text — 110%, 125%, 150%
- Line Height — 1.5x, 1.75x, 2x
- Letter and word spacing — light, moderate, heavy
- Invert Colors, then High Contrast
- Saturation — low, high, or monochrome
- Highlight Links, then Boxed Links
- Dyslexia Friendly type
- Big Cursor, then Bigger Cursor
- Pause animations
- Hide images
- Text alignment — left, centre, right
- Tooltips — reads out the descriptions a screen reader gets and a mouse never sees
Each one has its own switch on the settings screen, so you offer only what suits
your site.
Not an overlay
This matters, so it is worth saying plainly. Widewalk does not scan your site,
does not rewrite your pages for everybody, and does not claim to make you
compliant with anything. Those promises are what gave accessibility overlays
their reputation, and they are not promises any plugin can keep.
Real accessibility lives in your own markup: your headings, your alt text, your
colour contrast, your link names, your forms. Nothing installed in five minutes
changes that.
What Widewalk does is narrower and honest. It hands a visitor the settings they
would otherwise have to fight your stylesheet for. That helps somebody with low vision, dyslexia, a migraine, or a phone in bright
sunlight. It helps alongside the real work, never instead of it.
It writes your accessibility statement
Every site that offers a panel like this should say what it is aiming for and how
to report a barrier. Widewalk writes that page for you. Pick the complete
template, which follows the structure the W3C recommends, or the short one. Read
it through and publish it. It becomes an ordinary page you can edit afterwards.
The wording is built from what you actually have switched on. It claims partial
conformance and nothing more, because a plugin is in no position to certify a
site it has never seen.
Built to survive your theme
The panel renders inside a shadow root. Your theme’s stylesheet cannot reach into
it, and its stylesheet cannot leak out into your theme. It has been measured
against a stylesheet written specifically to break it: global button rules with
!important, a forced box model, oversized icons, a page claiming the highest
possible stacking order. It comes through unchanged.
Block themes and classic themes alike. Page builders too. It mounts on
wp_footer, which every theme fires.
Light, and quiet
- 7 KB gzipped for everything a visitor downloads — one stylesheet, one small
script, no framework, no jQuery. - With the panel switched off, nothing at all is added to your pages.
- No outbound requests. Not one, anywhere in the plugin. No account, no API
key, no third-party service, no fonts fetched from somewhere else. - No tracking and no cookies. A visitor’s preferences live in local storage on
their own device, under a single key.
Made to the standard it talks about
- Every control reachable and usable with a keyboard alone, with a visible focus
outline. - The panel is a labelled dialog; focus is held inside it and returned when it
closes. - Changes are announced to screen readers as they happen.
- Motion is dropped when the visitor’s device asks for less of it.
- Text and background inside the panel meet WCAG 2.2 AA contrast.
Who it is for
Anyone whose readers are not all twenty-five with perfect eyesight on a good
monitor. Charities, galleries, artists, schools, clinics, councils, shops,
newsletters, and any site that would rather be read than admired.
Screenshots
The panel open on a live site, with several controls set to different steps.
The panel enlarged, for anyone who finds the standard size hard to press.
Moving the panel to the other corner, or hiding it for this visit.
The settings screen — every control has its own switch, and the accessibility
statement is written from here.
