The accessibility widget

What the widget is

The accessibility widget is a panel your visitors can open, served by the same script that runs your cookie banner. You don't install a second tag. When a visitor changes a setting in the panel, the page changes immediately.

Some visitors read more comfortably with larger text, calmer motion, or clearer focus indicators, and most sites give them no way to ask for any of that. The widget lets them set those things on your site, without an account and without a round trip to anyone's server.

Does the widget make a site WCAG-compliant?

No. An overlay widget doesn't make a site WCAG-compliant, and UserGuard doesn't claim that it does, in the product or in this article. Compliance comes from remediation, which means fixing your markup: the structure, labels, and contrast of the pages you publish. A panel layered on top can't fix problems in the markup.

What the widget gives you is help for the visitors who want it, plus evidence that you offer that help. If you're working toward WCAG conformance, the widget can supplement that work but can't replace any of it.

What visitors can adjust

The panel offers these controls:

• Text size scales page text up to 140%.
• High contrast increases contrast across the page.
• Reduce motion tones down animation and movement.
• Readable font swaps in a plainer typeface.
• Highlight links makes links stand out visually.
• More text spacing adds space between lines and letters.
• Show keyboard focus makes the visible focus indicator stronger.
• Large cursor and Reduce color are optional extras you can enable.

We only offer a control if it changes the page, so none of these toggles is a placebo. Reset all puts everything back the way it was.

Where do the choices go?

They stay on the visitor's device. The settings are saved there and never sent to a server. That's also why the panel never asks for permission. Consent covers data leaving the device, and these settings don't leave it. When the visitor comes back, their settings still apply, and the only record of them is in their own browser.

Customizing the widget

In the customizer, you can set these for each site:

• Position on the page.
• Colors, to match your site.
• Copy, so the panel sounds like the rest of your site.
• Which features appear in the panel.

You can't save the widget with every control switched off, because the panel would open with nothing in it.

The customizer also lets you link your accessibility statement from the panel. If you don't have one yet, open the site's Documents tab and choose Edit & preview on the statement's row. That opens the document editor, where you draft every document, preview it beside a live render, and publish it. See Documents and the editor.

The panel's own accessibility

The widget's own interface is built to WCAG 2.1 AA. It's fully keyboard operable, the modal uses a focus trap, the focus ring stays visible, and label colors are luminance-checked. We hold it to that standard because an accessibility panel that keyboard users couldn't operate would be no use to them.

Turning it on

You turn the widget on per site with a toggle, and it's included on every tier. Once you enable it for a site, the script you already installed starts serving the panel, with nothing new to deploy. If you turn it off, the panel goes away. Your configuration stays saved on your side, and visitors' choices stay on their own devices.