WordPress Accessibility Plugin – Readabler

Readabler is a WordPress accessibility plugin that expands the boundaries of information accessibility for people with special portability. The availability of content for people with special needs or difficulties with information perception is the most important part of each site’s operation.

According to the World Health Organization research: globally, 1 billion people have a vision impairment that could have been prevented or has yet to be addressed.

These 1 billion people include those with moderate or severe distance vision impairment or blindness due to unaddressed refractive error (123.7 million), cataract (65.2 million), glaucoma (6.9 million), corneal opacities (4.2 million), diabetic retinopathy (3 million), and trachoma (2 million), as well as near vision impairment caused by unaddressed presbyopia (826 million).

The accessibility plugin for WordPress will make publications on your website accessible to people with perception problems, cognitive impairments, hearing or vision impairments.

The Readabler is a lightweight and powerful solution for increasing content accessibility on any WordPress site. The plugin is built on JavaScript, making it fully compatible with most existing WordPress Themes and extensions. It also allows the plugin to work quickly in any modern browser, both on a mobile device, laptop, and desktop computer.

Using the plugin settings, it is possible to choose a flexible set of settings and options that will be used on your site. Simultaneously, the plugin has 5 pre-installed profiles that will increase the accessibility of your site for people with Epilepsy, Visual Impaired, Cognitive Disability, ADHC, and also partially or completely blind.

Readable Experience

One of the plugin’s main features is to improve the readability of text content. To solve this problem, the plugin has settings for scaling the entire page or only some types of test, for example, a heading or plain text. Also important for readability are the settings for increasing line and letter spacing, changing all texts’ alignment.

For people who find it difficult to read text written in calligraphic or sans fonts, the plugin provides a mode for changing the font on the entire site to readable or to a font for people who have Dyslexia. Of course, an important part of any site is interaction with the page, for which the plugin provides modes for highlighting texts and titles and a magnifier that enlarges the text when you hover the mouse cursor over it.

Visually Pleasing

For people with visual impairments, the plugin provides a group of settings to optimize the entire page’s appearance or individual elements on the page.

In addition to the usual brightness, saturation, and contrast control modes, the plugin will make the site monochrome in black-white mode. And the change in the color of fonts and backgrounds makes available text that in the usual mode could not be readable or not noticeable and increase the accessibility of content on the page.

Ease of Orientation

A large group of settings to improve the WordPress Accessibility for people with orientation disorders. The Readabler automatically analyzes the page at load time and creates a list of all the page links. Several links do not go unnoticed or inaccessible for any reason.

One of the important settings in this group allows you to turn off anything that can flicker or blink, such as videos, CSS animations, and animated GIF images. Large cursors in black and white are available in the plugin to facilitate mouse navigation. Several modes for improved selection of objects on hover and focus and mode for controlling the page from the keyboard.

For people who cannot use the keyboard to type the test text, we have added a full virtual keyboard to the plugin. It is an on-screen keyboard with which you can enter text using manipulators such as a mouse or touchpad.

Text to Speech

An important setting for visually impaired people is the recognition and sounding of text on the page. The Readabler uses the latest technology of machine learning and artificial intelligence to play a high-quality human voice. The Text-to-Speech recognition basis is the Google Cloud Platform, which ensures the plugin’s reliability and speeds anywhere in the world.

The Readabler WordPress Plugin converts text into human-like speech in more than 240 voices across 40+ languages and variants. It applies groundbreaking research in speech synthesis (WaveNet) and Google’s robust neural networks to deliver high-fidelity audio.

All you need to do to hear the text from the page is turn on the settings mode and select the text. Please note that Google may charge additional fees for using this option.

Online Dictionary

For people with memory difficulties or forgetting to define things and concepts, we added Wikipedia to the plugin. To access the huge knowledge base of Wikipedia, you need to open the accessibility control panel and write a word to clarify the meaning in the search field. In a few seconds, Wikipedia will show everything it knows about this thing or concept. And all this happens without leaving your site and the cozy atmosphere of accessibility that the user has set up for himself.

Privacy

An important part of this is that user preferences are saved after leaving the site. This means that you do not have to add anything new to your site’s Privacy Policy and Data Protection Policy and remain compatible with GDPR, CCPA.

Key Features of the WordPress Accessibility Plugin

• Flexible accessible settings set
• Draggable accessibility window
• Appearance animation of the accessibility button
• Flexible style settings of the button
• Code meets standards WCAG 2.0 (AAA)
• Text recognition is powered by Google Cloud API
• Day(Light) and Night(Dark) Color Modes
• Automatically languages recognizing across 40+ languages
• Includes exclusive access to WaveNet technology
• Compatible with Elementor, WPBakery Page Builder, and Visual Composer
• Works well with all popular WordPress Themes
• 7 Positions for placing the accessibility button
• Includes .pot and ready for translation
• Perfect for RTL direction
• Native valid JavaScript, without jQuery
• Huge customization capabilities
• Beautiful modern user Interface
• Tested and compatible with WordPress 5+
• Lightweight and Fast
• Compatible with all modern browsers
• Easy to use and customize
• Installation guide
• Detailed users manual
• Six months included support for CodeCanyon buyers

Readabler WordPress Accessibility tested and compatible with all major WP Plugins: Yoast SEO, Contact Form 7, W3 Total Cache, NextGen Gallery, Slider Revolution, WooCommerce, etc. It also works perfectly and improves the user experience with popular Website Page Builders, like Elementor, Visual Composer, Gutenberg, Beaver Builder, Divi, Themify Builder, WP Bakery Page Builder, Layers WP, and many others. The plugin works perfectly with all significant WordPress frameworks: Genesis, Divi, Themify, Warp 7, Ultimatum, Beans, Unyson, Gantry, and others.

Learn a little more about what the plugin can do and how to configure it from the Online Documentation.

Changelog

1.5.3 - 25 February 2023
Fixed warning on frontend if text-to-speech is disabled

1.5.2 - 14 February 2023
Added Basque (Vasco) language and 1 voice
Added Galician (Galego) language and 1 voice

1.5.1 - 10 February 2023
The plugin manager dashboard widget is hidden

1.5.0 - 10 February 2023
Dyslexic font support extended for Greek, Cyrillic and Arabic glyphs
Added automatic translation files for Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian
Added highlight a paragraph for voicing as options for Text to Speech mode

1.4.8 - 21 December 2022
Added 14 News voices for English languages

1.4.7 - 20 October 2022
Fixed adjusting text color for <a> elements
</a>

1.4.6 - 18 October 2022
Removed unnecessary translation functions for CSS attributes

More changes in the changelog