Open Accessibility

A free and open-source suite of accessibility tools.

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Click Here to See Our Presentation!!!

Inspiration

Problem:

  • In the U.S., there are currently about 56.7 million Americans with a disability (Census Bureau)
  • 97.4% of the top 1 million websites have clear accessibility issues (WebAIM)
  • 23% of disabled respondents say they “never” go online (Pew Research)

Existing Solutions:

  • Are costly: Helperbird is a chrome extension that costs $40 a year to use even the most basic of its accessibility features.
  • Only work on certain websites: Userway is a solution that provides ADA compliance features for websites that pay for it. Problem: most don’t, users suffer.
  • Have other issues: Limited features, hard to use, or not open source.

What it does

Our Solution: Open Accessibility

An open-source, easy-to-use, all-in-one accessibility Chrome Extension.

  • Users can easily toggle a variety of accessibility features on/off, with no conflicts between features
  • Easily extendable project structure makes improvements and features from open-source contributors easy

And the best part: the users benefit!

  • We don’t need to lock features behind a paywall to fund development. Our open-source project allows for the crowdsourced development of features

Features

  • We’ve built 11 of the most useful accessibility features based on the needs of people with impairments.
  • In the future, we hope to add even more features.

Accessibility Feature List

  • Word Spacing
  • Font Size
  • Line Height
  • Dyslexia Ruler
  • Dyslexia Fonts
  • Reading Guide
  • Emphasize Links
  • Large Cursor
  • Disable Animations
  • Desaturate Colors
  • AI Image Captioning

How we built it

User Interface

Built by Rahul

  • Built with React, Tailwind, Framer, and Formik
  • Icons by Bootstrap icons

General Accessibility Features

Built by Max

  • Utilized Chrome extension API to modify browser pages
  • Handled state transitions between frontend and backend

Image Captioning

Built by Jeremy

  • Utilized A.I. to generate captions based on images
  • Modified browser pages to fill in alt text and provide a larger visual label

Challenges we ran into

  • Modifying the DOM to implement accessibility features
  • Synchronize state between the frontend and backend
  • Following through with complex API calls and integrating results in the browser window

What's next for Open Accessibility

Public Access

This tech demo is cool, but publishing on the Chrome Webstore is the next priority!

Audio Accessibility tools

Features like live caption or screen readers exist, are there ways we can implement them?

Unified Document Reader

Display content of pages of different formats and layouts in a unified and familiar document reader.

Miscellaneous Features

Suggested settings for different disabilities. More options, like opacity for Reading Guide and colors for Dyslexia Ruler.

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