Add the PageAssist Accessibility Toolbar to Your Site
Turn on the PageAssist accessibility toolbar so visitors can change text size, contrast, spacing, fonts, link highlighting and animations to suit their needs.
Table of contents
The PageAssist accessibility toolbar is a small button that appears in a corner of your website. Visitors open it to change how your pages look for them: bigger text, stronger contrast, more space between lines, an easier font, highlighted links or no animations. Each visitor’s choices are saved in their own browser and apply only to them.
The PageAssist accessibility toolbar comes with your plan. It runs through AccessBellFix, so there is nothing extra to install once the snippet is on your site.
What the PageAssist Accessibility Toolbar Offers Visitors
| Setting | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Text size | Makes the whole page larger in four steps, up to 160%. |
| Colors | High contrast, Dark or Grayscale. Images and video keep their normal colors in Dark mode. |
| Text spacing | Line height, paragraph, letter and word spacing set to the values in WCAG 1.4.12 Text Spacing. |
| Readable font | Switches body text to a plain, wide sans-serif font. |
| Highlight links | Underlines and outlines links and gives them a yellow background so they are easy to spot. |
| Stop animations | Pauses CSS animations, transitions and smooth scrolling. |
Reset all returns everything to normal. Visitors can open and use the toolbar with a keyboard or a screen reader, and Escape closes it.
Turn On the PageAssist Accessibility Toolbar
- Install AccessBellFix on your site, if you have not already.
- Open your domain and select the Settings tab.
- Under PageAssist toolbar, tick Show the PageAssist toolbar on my site.
- Choose Bottom right or Bottom left, then select Save toolbar settings.
Reload your site. The toolbar button appears within a few seconds. Owners and admins can change this setting. See roles.
To remove it, untick the box and save. The button disappears on the next page load.
What the Toolbar Does Not Do
The PageAssist accessibility toolbar is a comfort tool for visitors. It does not fix your code, and it does not make your website conform to WCAG or the ADA. A missing form label, an image without alt text or a menu that does not work with a keyboard is still broken for everyone, with or without the toolbar.
Keep fixing the issues AccessBell finds. Read an issue to see the failing code and how to change it, and use the Compliance Vault to record your fixes. Your own site should also respect the visitor’s system settings, such as reduced motion and text resized to 200%, without needing the toolbar.
Sites With a Content Security Policy
The toolbar needs the same permissions as AccessBellFix and nothing more. If your site has a strict policy, follow AccessBellFix and Content Security Policy.
Sources and Further Reading
- Understanding Success Criterion 1.4.4: Resize Text W3C Web Accessibility Initiative
- Understanding Success Criterion 1.4.12: Text Spacing W3C Web Accessibility Initiative
- prefers-reduced-motion MDN Web Docs
- Understanding WCAG 2.2 W3C Web Accessibility Initiative
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