Widewalk – Accessibility Toolbar

Widewalk puts a small button in the corner of your site. A visitor presses it and a panel opens with the settings they need in order to read you: bigger text, more air between the lines, letters further apart, links they can actually pick out of a paragraph, a calmer palette, a pointer large enough to find. Whatever they choose is kept in their own browser. Nobody else's view of your site moves an inch. You switch it on once. It works with the theme you already have, on the front end you already have, and it asks nothing of your visitors in return. What you decide All twelve controls have their own switch, so you offer the ones that suit your site and leave the rest off. You choose which bottom corner the button sits in. You publish your accessibility statement from the same screen, in a long or a short version. That is the whole settings page, and there is nothing to configure before it works. The name comes from pavements built wide enough for everyone at the same time: the wheelchair, the pushchair, the delivery trolley, and the people walking alongside them. Widen the path rather than build a second one round the back. What a visitor can change Each control steps through its settings as it is pressed, and the button says which step it is on. "Line Height (1.75x)" or "Low Saturation" tells a visitor where they are without making them guess.

• Bigger Text, at 110%, 125% and 150%
• Line Height, at 1.5x, 1.75x and 2x
• Letter and word spacing, from light through to 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, which read out the descriptions a screen reader gets and a mouse user never sees

Twelve of them, and each has its own switch on the settings screen. Offer the ones that suit your site and leave the rest off. This is not an overlay Worth saying plainly, because that word has earned its reputation. Widewalk does not scan your pages, does not rewrite them for everybody, and makes no claim about your legal compliance. Those three promises are what the overlay industry sells, and no plugin is in a position to keep them. Accessibility lives in your own markup. Your headings, your alt text, your colour contrast, your link text, your forms. Five minutes with any plugin will not change what is underneath. What Widewalk does is smaller and it is true. It hands a visitor the settings they would otherwise have to fight your stylesheet for, which is real help to somebody with low vision, or dyslexia, or a migraine coming on, or a phone held up in bright sunlight. Do the underlying work as well. This sits beside it. It writes your accessibility statement Any site that offers a panel like this ought to say what it is aiming for and how to report a problem. Most plugins tell you to go away and write one. Widewalk writes it for you, out of what you have actually switched on, and shows you the whole thing before a word of it is published. Choose the complete version, which follows the structure the W3C recommends, or the short one if your site is small. You supply two things: an address where somebody can report a barrier, and the number of working days you will take to reply. Promise something you can keep. Publish it and you have an ordinary WordPress page, yours to edit like any other. Widewalk will not overwrite it later. The wording claims partial conformance and nothing beyond that, because a plugin cannot certify a site it has never seen. Built to survive your theme The panel renders inside a shadow root. Your stylesheet cannot reach into it, and its stylesheet cannot leak out into your pages. It has been measured against a theme written for the sole purpose of breaking it: global button rules marked !important, a forced box model, oversized icons, a page claiming the highest stacking order there is. It came through without a mark. Block themes, classic themes, page builders. It mounts on wp_footer, which every theme fires. Works past WordPress, too Plenty of sites keep WordPress for the admin and build their public pages in plain PHP, in React, or as static files. Nothing on those pages runs a WordPress footer, so the panel never arrives. Add one line to your own instead: <script src="/wp-content/plugins/widewalk/assets/embed.js" defer></script> Same panel, same controls, the settings you already chose. Nothing else to set up. Light, and quiet about it

• About 7 KB gzipped covers everything a visitor downloads. One stylesheet, one small script, no framework, no jQuery.
• Switch the panel off and nothing at all is added to your pages.
• No outbound requests anywhere in the plugin. No account, no API key, no third-party service, no fonts pulled from somebody else's server.
• No tracking and no cookies. Preferences sit in local storage on the visitor's own device, under a single key.

Made to the standard it talks about

• Every control works from the keyboard alone, with a focus outline you can see.
• The panel is a labelled dialog. Focus stays inside it while it is open, and returns where it came from when it closes.
• Changes are announced to screen readers as they happen.
• Motion stops when a visitor's device has asked for less of it.
• Text and background inside the panel meet WCAG 2.2 AA contrast.

Who installs it Sites whose readers are not all twenty-five with good eyes and a large monitor. Charities, galleries, schools, clinics, councils, artists, shops, small newsrooms. Anywhere that would rather be read than admired.

1. Install from Plugins → Add New, or upload the folder to /wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate it.
3. Open Settings → Widewalk and switch the panel on.
4. While you are there, publish your accessibility statement from one of the two templates. Read it through afterwards and make it true of your site.

That is the whole setup. There is nothing to configure before it works.

1.0.6

• New: a widewalk:motion event, and the data-a11y-animations marker on the page, so a slideshow or anything else driven by a script can hold still while a visitor has asked for stillness. Two lines in a theme are enough, and the FAQ shows them.

1.0.5

• Improved: pausing animation reaches video, sound and moving SVG, as well as the animation a stylesheet controls. Anything a visitor had already paused is left alone, and everything resumes when the control is switched off again.
• Improved: tooltips appear beside the pointer, and only for the thing being pointed at. A label that repeats words already on the screen stays quiet.
• Improved: both of those hold from the moment a page opens, not only after the control is pressed again.

1.0.4

• New: a card on the settings screen for sites whose public pages WordPress does not build. It shows the one line to paste, with a button to copy it, and will fetch a page of yours and tell you whether the line arrived.
• New: on a server that can do it, Widewalk will offer to add that line for you. It shows exactly what it would write before you decide, keeps your file first, checks your front page afterwards, and puts everything back untouched unless the page comes back whole with the line in it. You can undo it at any time, and pasting by hand always works instead.

1.0.3

• Improved: clearing the page cache after a change is more dependable, using each caching plugin's own published method.

1.0.2

• Improved: where a theme or kit already puts this same panel on the page, the plugin stands aside rather than adding a second one.

1.0.1

• New: the panel can be added to pages WordPress does not render. A site whose front end is plain PHP, React or static files adds one script tag and gets the same panel, with the same settings.
• Improved: bigger text now reaches every theme. Sizes are set on the text itself, so a theme that measures in fixed pixels grows with the rest.
• Improved: switching the panel on, or changing what it offers, clears the page cache so visitors see it straight away.

1.0.0

• New: a reading panel on every page, with twelve controls a visitor sets for themselves. Text size, line height, letter spacing, contrast, saturation, link marks, dyslexia-friendly type, cursor size, animation, images, alignment and tooltips.
• New: each control steps through its settings and names the one in force, so a visitor always knows where they are.
• New: every control can be offered or withheld from a single settings screen.
• New: writes your accessibility statement in a complete or a short version, out of what you have switched on, and links the panel to it.
• New: the panel can sit in either bottom corner, and a visitor can move it themselves.
• Isolated inside a shadow root, so it survives any theme and disturbs none of it.
• Keyboard operable throughout, focus held and returned, changes announced, motion dropped when the visitor asks for less.
• About 7 KB gzipped on the front end, and nothing at all when the panel is off.
• No tracking, no cookies, no account, no outbound request of any kind.