I have today for the first time encountered an Elementor-powered suite of accessibility options on https://northwestbylines.co.uk.
Does the #a11y communtity here have a view on what it does?
The options seems good to me, but I really don’t like how the button for it hovers mid-way down the viewport over content
@urlyman often well-intentioned but usually poorly executed. Most disabled users say they don’t find this helpful. For some background, see https://overlayfactsheet.com/en/ and especially the linked reading at the bottom.
@mallonbacka Thanks. I’m aware of the general concern with accessibility overlays but is that what the linked example is doing?
As your link highlights, overlays try to remediate HTML, whereas at first glance the Elementor thing seems to be purely making CSS-derived presentational changes? Or have I got that wrong?
@urlyman I'd say about 90% of what most overlays do is CSS adjustments. But I'd only spent about 30 seconds looking when I replied to your post. On a closer look, it looks like this has a narrower range of features than a lot of the overlays, and some of the most problematic are missing, so that's a mildly positive thing.
In my opinion, though, this is still not very useful. This functionality should (and does) live in the operating system, browser or a browser extension. It's a red flag, in my mind, when a website owner thinks it's their responsibility to provide these options, and that they think a third party script is the way to do it.
In this case, it feels like this is mostly performative. For example, if you increase the text size, the items on the homepage get truncated and some become unusable, so it seems that the website owner/designer/etc hasn't even tested these functions themselves.
@mallonbacka thank you. Those were my instincts too. Thanks for taking the time to look more closely
