AxSHammer

AxSHammer

Tools to help hammer an inaccessible website into shape

What is AxSHammer?
AxSHammer is a Firefox add-on that provides a set of tools to help fix inaccessible websites. It offers features like exposing completely inaccessible elements, removing aria-hidden, disabling ARIA live regions, and more. The add-on aims to provide accessibility options for users when fixing a website is not possible or feasible.
Merlin
Stats
By: Jamie Teh
Users: 45
Rating: 4.50 (2)
Version: 2020.1 (Last updated: 2020-10-15)
Creation date: 2020-10-15
Weekly download count: 3
Firefox on Android: No
Risk impact: Very low risk impact
Risk likelihood: Low risk likelihood
Manifest version: 2
Permissions:
  • menus
  • activeTab
Size: 8.63K
Stats date:

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Merlin
Summary

In an ideal world, websites would all be accessible. Sadly, the world is far from ideal. Sometimes, you might be able to convince the owner to fix their website. Other times, the accessibility of a particular site can be improved via scripts or assistive technology support written specifically for that site. But sometimes, you don't have the ability, time, money, patience or energy for either of these. You just want some kind of access and you're willing to deal with a bit (or a lot) of ugliness to get it. AxSHammer is an add-on which provides a set of tools to try to help in this situation. They might not work. They might break things further. Even if they do work, the access they provide is probably going to be ugly and suboptimal. But when you're out of options, it might just be enough. Maybe.

The tools AxSHammer provides are accessed from the context menu of a web page, inside the AxSHammer menu.

Expose completely inaccessible elements: Websites frequently use elements containing background images or icons. If these aren't made accessible, they might not be visible to screen readers at all, to the point where a user might not even know they're there. For example, my local Pizza store allows you to customise the ingredients on your pizza. Each ingredient has a quantity and two icons (decrease and increase) to adjust the quantity. The two icons don't show up with a screen reader at all. Similarly, some companies have tables comparing products/services and they use inaccessible icons to show whether a particular product has or doesn't have a given feature. This tool looks for elements which contain no text. It makes each such element into a button so you can find it. Furthermore, it uses information from the web page code (technically, the class attribute) to deduce a label. The label might be pretty ugly, but it might be enough to distinguish it or help you figure out what it is. Note that this is likely to make a lot of things into buttons which aren't useful, but in some cases, the pros outweigh the cons.

Kill all aria-hidden: aria-hidden allows authors to specify that something should be invisible for accessibility purposes. Unfortunately, this is sometimes misused by authors, potentially hiding huge parts of a page or even the entire page! This is particularly common after closing a dialog. Or it could be as small (yet critical) as a checkout button which has been accidentally hidden for accessibility, as I saw on Robins Kitchen. This tool removes aria-hidden from everything. If you suspect that something on a page has been hidden from your assistive technology, give this tool a try.

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User reviews
by Reggie L Addison, 2024-04-09

by Reggie L Addison, 2024-04-09

Great thing, thank you for doing that! These are so oftenthose situations where I was annoyed on some sites, or found very important things were aria-hidden. Good work. A small feature I could still imagine in this add-on, is to change the site language (mostly specified through the lang attribut in the <html> tag). Sometimes it is false, causing the screenreader to sound funny, but not speak in the right language. But appart from that, thank you for this add-on!
by WiseGuy02, 2022-02-18
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Safety
Risk impact

AxSHammer is safe to use. It does not request any sensitive permissions.

Risk likelihood

AxSHammer has earned a fairly good reputation and likely can be trusted.

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