WordPress Accessibility Plugin – Readabler

According to the World Health Organization research: globally, 1 billion people have a vision impairment that could have been prevented or has yet to be addressed.

These 1 billion people include those with moderate or severe distance vision impairment or blindness due to unaddressed refractive error (123.7 million), cataract (65.2 million), glaucoma (6.9 million), corneal opacities (4.2 million), diabetic retinopathy (3 million), and trachoma (2 million), as well as near vision impairment caused by unaddressed presbyopia (826 million).

The accessibility plugin for WordPress will make publications on your website accessible to people with perception problems, cognitive impairments, hearing or vision impairments.

The Readabler is a lightweight and powerful solution for increasing content accessibility on any WordPress site. The plugin is built on JavaScript, making it fully compatible with most existing WordPress Themes and extensions. It also allows the plugin to work quickly in any modern browser, both on a mobile device, laptop, and desktop computer.

Using the plugin settings, it is possible to choose a flexible set of settings and options that will be used on your site. Simultaneously, the plugin has 5 pre-installed profiles that will increase the accessibility of your site for people with Epilepsy, Visual Impaired, Cognitive Disability, ADHC, and also partially or completely blind.

Readable Experience

One of the plugin’s main features is to improve the readability of text content. To solve this problem, the plugin has settings for scaling the entire page or only some types of test, for example, a heading or plain text. Also important for readability are the settings for increasing line and letter spacing, changing all texts’ alignment.

For people who find it difficult to read text written in calligraphic or sans fonts, the plugin provides a mode for changing the font on the entire site to readable or to a font for people who have Dyslexia.
Of course, an important part of any site is interaction with the page, for which the plugin provides modes for highlighting texts and titles and a magnifier that enlarges the text when you hover the mouse cursor over it.

Visually Pleasing

For people with visual impairments, the plugin provides a group of settings to optimize the entire page’s appearance or individual elements on the page.

In addition to the usual brightness, saturation, and contrast control modes, the plugin will make the site monochrome in black-white mode.
And the change in the color of fonts and backgrounds makes available text that in the usual mode could not be readable or not noticeable and increase the accessibility of content on the page.

Ease of Orientation

A large group of settings to improve the WordPress Accessibility for people with orientation disorders. The Readabler automatically analyzes the page at load time and creates a list of all the page links. Several links do not go unnoticed or inaccessible for any reason.

One of the important settings in this group allows you to turn off anything that can flicker or blink, such as videos, CSS animations, and animated GIF images.
Large cursors in black and white are available in the plugin to facilitate mouse navigation. Several modes for improved selection of objects on hover and focus and mode for controlling the page from the keyboard.

For people who cannot use the keyboard to type the test text, we have added a full virtual keyboard to the plugin. It is an on-screen keyboard with which you can enter text using manipulators such as a mouse or touchpad.

Text to Speech

An important setting for visually impaired people is the recognition and sounding of text on the page. The Readabler uses the latest technology of machine learning and artificial intelligence to play a high-quality human voice. The Text-to-Speech recognition basis is the Google Cloud Platform, which ensures the plugin’s reliability and speeds anywhere in the world.

The Readabler WordPress Plugin converts text into human-like speech in more than 240 voices across 40+ languages and variants. It applies groundbreaking research in speech synthesis (WaveNet) and Google’s robust neural networks to deliver high-fidelity audio.

All you need to do to hear the text from the page is turn on the settings mode and select the text. Please note that Google may charge additional fees for using this option.

Online Dictionary

For people with memory difficulties or forgetting to define things and concepts, we added Wikipedia to the plugin. To access the huge knowledge base of Wikipedia, you need to open the accessibility control panel and write a word to clarify the meaning in the search field. In a few seconds, Wikipedia will show everything it knows about this thing or concept. And all this happens without leaving your site and the cozy atmosphere of accessibility that the user has set up for himself.