Web User Scripting
From ITCH
User scripts enhance website accessibility
This is an Ability Magazine news Item to be published alongside an article on web design that John will run.
The growing use of user scripts to control users' interaction with web sites means it is possible to improve a website's accessibility without having to alter the site itself.
A website’s look and feel is traditionally ‘set in stone’ by the designers of the site so that if it has poor accessibility individual users will have to either lobby the owner or else ‘vote with their mouse’ by going elsewhere. Sites that correctly use the W3C standard for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are an improvement as they allow the look of the site to be changed for a visitor by the simple step of configuring their browser to use a custom style sheet.
User Scripts allow a visitor’s experience of a site to be changed in any conceivable way. Pages can be altered so that they work better with assistive technologies that speak a web page out loud or convert it to Braille. It is even possible to make two sites more interconnected by displaying information from another site. This technology puts the visitor back in control and is sometimes called the ‘hackable web’. It works by providing local JavaScript code that runs when a page is viewed.
It started with the Greasemonkey [1] extension module for Firefox, the popular Open Source web browser. A preliminary implementation of Greasemonkey exists for IE and the Opera browser now has a version of user scripts.
A new online primer for Greasemonkey [2] gives a good introduction to how the user can be put back in the ‘driving seat’. It uses examples taken from the many scripts available in the repository of contributions provided by the Greasemonkey community [3]. Why not give Greasemonkey a ‘test drive’?
User scripts are another example of how OATS (Open Source Accessibility Software) can enhance accessibility and provide custom solutions that meet individual needs [4].
