Contrast, read aloud, reading guide: who each feature actually helps
Behind every setting in the widget there is a concrete situation. Here is which one, and who benefits from it.
From the outside an accessibility widget looks like a collection of switches. Anyone who has never depended on one sees contrast modes, font sizes and a read-aloud function and wonders who needs that. The answer is more concrete than most people assume, and it covers considerably more people than the obvious group.
Higher contrast and larger text
The obvious group is people with low vision. Two situations come on top of that, and they can hit anyone. One is age: from around forty the ability to focus quickly on close-up text declines, and fine grey type becomes tiring. The other is sunlight. Looking at a phone screen outdoors calls for the same boost as a visual impairment does.
The point being: this setting applies to your site only and only in this one visitor's browser. Nobody has to go into their system settings and back out again.
Read aloud
Blind people generally use their own screen reader and do not need our read-aloud function. It helps a different group: people with dyslexia, people reading German as a second language, and people who would rather hear a long text than read it at the end of a long day.
Reading guide and reading mask
The reading guide places a bar under the current line, the reading mask dims everything except a narrow strip. Both help with holding the line. Anyone who regularly loses their place in a long table or a block of body text knows the problem, and it has nothing to do with visual acuity but with attention and processing.
Letter and line spacing
Tight typesetting looks good in a design mockup and makes reading considerably harder for some people. Increased line spacing is the setting most often changed together with font size, and it costs your layout the least.
Large cursor and highlighted links
An enlarged pointer helps with limited fine motor control and on large or high-resolution screens where the standard arrow looks tiny. Highlighted links solve a problem many websites create themselves: links that differ from the surrounding text only by a slightly different colour are invisible to people with colour vision deficiency.
Stopping animations
Moving elements can trigger nausea and dizziness, particularly with vestibular disorders. For others they are simply a distraction that interrupts reading. Operating systems have a setting for this, but far from every website acts on it.
Simplifying text and describing images
These two features run through a language model. Simplifying rewrites a convoluted paragraph into shorter sentences without changing what it says. Image description steps in when an image has no alt text. That is explicitly a stopgap and no substitute for maintaining alt text: a machine sees what is in the image, but not why it is in that spot.
What the widget does not do
All of these features change the presentation for the individual visitor. None of them repairs your source. If the skip link is missing, it stays missing. If the main content is not marked up, it stays that way. In our survey of 14,984 German business websites, 99.3 percent had at least one such barrier, and all of them sit in the delivered HTML. The widget helps the people who are on your site today. It takes none of the work underneath off anyone's hands.