BirchToad – Accessibility Toolbar
BirchToad adds a small button to your site. A visitor who clicks it gets a panel where they can change how your pages look and behave, to suit how they read: bigger text, more line spacing, a readable font, stronger contrast, a dark or light theme, less saturation, highlighted links and headings, a
BirchToad adds a small button to your site. A visitor who clicks it gets a panel where they can change how your pages look and behave, to suit how they read: bigger text, more line spacing, a readable font, stronger contrast, a dark or light theme, less saturation, highlighted links and headings, a reading guide, a big cursor, animations stopped, images hidden.
Their choices are remembered in their own browser, and the toolbar sends nothing anywhere.
What BirchToad is, and what it is not
BirchToad helps real people use your site, and it supports the accessibility work you do. It does not make a website accessible, compliant or conformant with WCAG, the ADA or the European Accessibility Act, and no toolbar can. Missing alternative text, an unclear heading order, unlabelled form fields and keyboard traps all have to be fixed in the site itself. We would rather tell you that plainly than sell you a badge.
Built for right to left sites
The panel lays out right to left whenever your site does, and that works even before any translation exists, because direction is read from the site and not from a language file. Hebrew and Arabic were in the first release rather than added later.
Nothing loads from anyone else’s server
Every stylesheet, script and icon the toolbar uses is served from your own server. Your visitors are never sent to a CDN, and nothing about them is collected or sent anywhere. That is a privacy and performance difference from the hosted overlay services, not a detail.
About the Freemius library
The plugin does include Freemius, which is how the paid version is licensed and updated. It asks you once whether to connect, you can skip that screen and keep using the plugin, and it never touches the front end your visitors see. Everything it would send is listed under External services below.
What visitors can change
- Content scaling, font size, line height, letter spacing and word spacing, each with a reset to default
- A readable font
- Highlighted links and highlighted headings
- Text alignment
- Light, dark and high contrast
- Saturation: high, low or monochrome
