An a11y extension coming to a browser near you

Last year when I was looking to take on a new role somewhere, one of the places I interviewed at was Khan Academy. TLDR, I wasn’t hired 😉. However, as a candidate, I wanted to stand out. Relevant post 👇

Take chances and stand out

Nick Taylor ・ Jan 7 '19

#career #interview #motivation

In a nutshell, I put up a PR to Khan’s tota11y repository to convert their a11y tool to a browser extension.

jdan / tota11y

an accessibility (a11y) visualization toolkit

tota11y

An accessibility visualization toolkit

Try tota11y in your browser, or read why we built tota11y.

Deprecation Notice

tota11y was created at a time when tooling to assist in developing accessible solutions was sparse. Since then, not only have some great browser extensions and automated tooling come into existence, like axe and axe-core from deque, but browsers have added specific development tooling to support accessibility. As such, we are no longer actively developing or maintaining tota11y.

After careful consideration of the options available, we decided to archive the repository and deprecate the project. As such, we will no longer be accepting pull requests or issues.

Thank you for all the support this project has received over the years and for all those who work hard to ensure the web is accessible to all.

Special thanks

Many of tota11y's features come straight from Google Chrome's Accessibility Developer Tools…

View on GitHub

The goal of the PR was, aside from standing out, was to make it an extension without interfering with how their tool works when loaded as a bookmarklet.

I’ll be up front, I’m not an a11y expert, so this tool was actually really good for me to learn a few things. Here’s a shot of it in action.

One of the coolest features is the screen reader wand (Khan's work, not mine).

The PR isn’t merged yet, but will hopefully be in the next month or so. Regardless, you can try it out today as an unpacked extension in Chrome, FireFox, Brave or any browser that lets you load Chrome Webstore extensions. All you need to do is clone my branch and build it locally. See the README for instructions for loading it as an unpacked extension.

I hope you find it useful and shoutout to the devs at Khan for making this great tool.