Re:Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackabl...
by apsanz on Monday July 29, 2019 @03:40PM
(#20558549)
Which specific extensions work well? My wife is visually impaired and she has tried a several extensions. All of them have cause more problems than they have solved. In addition, IE and firefox's attempts to change behavior when using windows high contrast mode also breaks many sites. Safari is the browser that works the most reliably.
Re:Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackabl...
by gnicholas on Monday July 29, 2019 @06:24PM
(#20560096)
Well, I'm the founder of BeeLine Reader[1], and our extension is used for speed reading as well as accessibility (vision impairment, dyslexia, ADHD). I don't think it breaks websites, since we let the user decide how aggressively it should try to run. There are also night mode extensions, as well as site-specific ones (like for wikipedia) that are great.
Re:Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackabl...
by paulryanrogers on Monday July 29, 2019 @05:03PM
(#20559421)
"Dark Background and Light Text" for Firefox has worked for me. Some necessary background images are still invisible, though I chalk those up to bad implementions.
Unfortunately, the big mobile browsers do not support extensions, which is a huge blow to accessibility. I think Firefox for Android is the only mainstream-ish browser that supports extensions. Apple prevents them from doing the same on iOS because it would be considered "an app store within an app", which is forbidden.
The only thing Apple allows is action and share extensions, which have to be manually activated on every single page (2-3 taps to do so — which is super user-unfriendly, esp. for PWD). It's great that Apple does a lot for accessibility in general, but I really wish they would open things up a bit more so that users could customize the iOS experience to make it more accessible.
As a dev, I would be more than happy to have my code scrutinized even further in order to ensure that what we're doing doesn't create security, privacy, or performance issues. We'd just like to make our accessibility software as useful for folks on mobile as it is on desktop!