There is no need to take the web as it comes. Fonts too small to read, color schemes that make you squint, bright white backgrounds that scream for you sunglasses, images too small to make out. These issues can be solved. You can take control. Changing colors, fonts and image size is no longer requires a degree in computer science. It takes more that a single click of the mouse, but it can be you can make your web experience.

Access Firefox

Many of the things I will say here are echoed in the AccessFirefox.org web site. While AccessFirefox.org attempts to be universal, I will highlight here just the few things I think you will need. The first is Firefox. If you are reading this in Microsoft’s default Internet Explorer or even in Apple’s Safari, download Firefox and install it now. Firefox, which is built by volunteers and is free, allows developers to build and distribute software add-ons that allow us to customize our web experience. With just t three of these add-ons, your web experience will be transformed and your sore eyes grateful.

No Squint

No Squint

The No Squint add-on is my personal favorite. Once installed, this extension allows you to set both the text and full page zoom for each site you visit. By default, Firefox uses only the full page zoom. In image heavy web sites, full-page zoom can completely mess up the page layout before the text is large enough to read. By allowing text zoom only, No Squint makes the text legible without ruining the look of the page.

Just as importantly, No Squint remembers settings for each site you visit, not just the page, and it automatically re-zooms when you visit any page on that site. For sites that you have not visited before, you can use No Squint to set a default full-page or text zoom level. The only flaw, in my mind, is that you can not set a default zoom that has full-page at one level and text zoom at another.

Accessibar

Accessibar

Accessibar is the second most useful add-on I use. This extension incorporates several accessibility features onto a toolbar at the top of the screen in an ambitions program that mostly meets its goals. Accessibar offers full customization, font and colors,  for each page you visit plus a magnifier and screen reader. Of all these features, I use only the color customization. From the toolbar, you can easily change the background, text and link colors. I regularly set these so I am reading gold text on a black background, as that creates the proper contrast without too much brightness. Why not use Firefox settings to force all pages to follow this color scheme? A significant number of websites become unreadable when their color scheme is changed. Google Maps is a prime example. Accessibar has a Restore Page button on the toolbar. One click and the colors are back to the site’s default scheme. If you force Firefox to always use an alternative color scheme, using these problematic websites requires changing your Firefox settings twice. I find that too cumbersome. So Accessibar is a much better option.

Accessibar is not without its drawbacks, however. Unlike No Squint, Accessibar does not always remember the settings for a page, even after a simple refresh. Each time I open Firefox, I need to set Accessibar colors for each page. News sites, like Google News and the New York Times, which I tend to leave open all day, refresh themselves automatically every few minutes. Each time this happens, my Accessibar color settings are lost. So I lost a bit of time each redoing Accessibar settings.

Another simple improvement would be to have a default color scheme button. Almost always, I use Accessibar to change to the same color scheme, gold on black. Instead of clicking on a single button for my favorite color scheme, I need to set the background color, text color and link color (which I often skip) individually from drop-down color palettes.

I have contacted the authors of Accessibar to about these feature requests. Unfortunately, these programmers do this on a volunteer basis, so we will have to wait until they have some free time.

Image Zoom

Image Zoom

I only use Image Zoom every once in a while, but, when I do, it is extremely useful. Image Zoomputs adds a bunch of options to the right click menu. Once installed, you right-click on an image to get the normal context menu with an menu labeled Zoom Image (100%), The Zoom image menu then allows you to set the zoom level for that image up to 400%. I have posted about Image Zoom before and have a nice screen shot of the menu that post up. Image Zoomkeeps the enlarged image right where it was on the site, so you can keep doing whatever you were doing on the site. I use this whenever I bump into the annoying and omnipresent CAPTCHA we-want-to-make-sure-you-are-human images where you are asked to transcribe some letters and numbers from a small image. Zooming into the image at 400% is often enough for me to solve these frustrating puzzles.

The Future

Hopefully, all these developers can work together to improve their add-ons. Even more helpful would be for someone to bring them together into one download. No Squint and Accessibar are two obvious candidates for a merge. No Squint is much more persistent, while Accessibar has more features. Rolling No Squint’s memory into an improved Accessibar would make me happy and make accessing the web simpler for everyone.

Tags: accessibar, extension, firefox, font, image, image zoom, NoSquint, text, zoom

This entry was posted on December 9, 2008 at 11:53 am and is filed under large print. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.