Blank Your Monitor + Easy Reading = Accessibility for Low Vision Users of Firefox

Contrast can often be a problem for people with Low Vision.  Most designers of operating systems recognize this fact and build in accommodations. 

Windows has a series of “High Contrast” themes to choose from, and also allows the user to assign colors, sizes, and fonts to different elements of the GUI. 

OS X has a feature where the user can reverse the colors of the GUI.  All white elements become black; all black elements become white, etc.  Apple has extended this reverse color accessibility feature to iOS on the iPhone and iPad.

The problem with this approach to accessibility, which I utilize all the time in Word or Excel, is how it then impacts the user experience on the internet.  When the system colors are set to be reversed, they apply that theme to the internet without discretion.  Photographs and Video suffer the same reversal of colors as text, when in most cases, an ease of reading text is all the Low Vision user is seeking.

A tool I’ve found useful in keeping the graphic part of my internet experience clean while still being able to easily read text in reversed black background with white letters is the Firefox plugin Blank Your Monitor + Easy Reading

Once installed, you just right click on an article and then click “Easy Read” at the bottom of the dialogue box.  A new tab opens up with a black background and all the text from the page in white. 

Fairly easy to read, except for one annoying thing.  Literally, ALL the text on the page is rendered out, including the headers, logins, the follow us on…, captions under pictures, footers, etc.  It can be kind of like those puzzles where you try to find the words vertically, horizontally, and diagonally from a full page of letters (OK, so maybe I’m exaggerating a little).

The current version 1.9 of Blank Your Monitor + Easy Reading was released in October of 2013.  What I’d like to see in a version 2.0 release is some combination of the reader feature in Safari that does just render out the body text and the reversing of colors that is the main accessibility feature of the current app.  But for now, Blank Your Monitor + Easy Reading is a nice little add on to consider if you’re like me and  have trouble reading web pages.