Is there any way to have an accessibility toolbar on a laravel project?

Question

For my laravel project I need to implement an accessibility toolbar; however, I can't find an already developed toolbar. The only toolbar that I found was the ADA toolbar but it's for wordpress.

Do you know about any toolbar for laravel that I could use or should I create it myself?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Having a toolbar to allow various adjustments to a site such as font, color schemes, etc is an ok thing to do as long as the toolbar isn't trying to replace making the site accessible. These latter tools are typically called "overlays" and many of them market themselves as saying you don't have to fix any accessibility issues and all you have to do is plugin their tool to your site (and pay them a fee every month). It's blatent false advertising and several groups are working with the FCC regarding this.

• A guide to accessibility overlays
• Overlay Fact Sheet
• The Many Pitfalls of Accessibility Overlays
• Accessibility Overlays May Not Make Your Site More Accessible
• Why Accessibility Overlay Solutions Fail to Protect or Serve
• Should I Use An Accessibility Overlay?

But with that out of the way, if you've already spent time making the site accessible, then having a toolbar to help with accessibility is ok. A good example is the State of California. Click on the "Settings" cog in the upper right...

and you'll see some handy adjustments you can make to the site. Higher contrast, font size, and font face.

These are all helpful things. The settings don't replace any accessibility work that's been done on the page. The webiste already has good color contrast. The website already has a good font (although there aren't any WCAG requirements when it comes to font.)

Making a website is not that difficult, contrary to what you may think. Most (I'd say over 90%, probably higher) accessibility issues are super easy to fix. It's usually the volume of issues that takes time. Lots of easy fixes still add up to a lot of time if there are 1000s of them.

Finding accessibility issues might be the challenging part if you're not familiar with WCAG. For anyone that's been doing accessibility testing for a few years, it's not that challenging.