adamjenkins / moodle-local_accessibility

v3.0.2 2026-10-04 11:48 UTC

Requires

• moodle/composer-installer: ^1.0
• moodle/moodle: ^4.5 || ^5.0

GPL-3.0-or-later

Published on Packagist.org on 2026-10-04 13:24 UTC

README

Lets every user adjust how Moodle looks and reads for them: text size, spacing, fonts, colours, motion and more. It is one plugin with all features built in.

Features

• A panel with one tile per setting. Each tile shows its current setting in words, for example "Font, OpenDyslexic Alta". Open the panel with the floating button, the user menu entry or the keyboard shortcut Alt+A.
• Every option is shown and can be chosen directly, each with an icon or a preview and a label. Short lists open in a drawer under the tile; longer ones (text size, font, spacing, line width, colours) open a detail view. Arrow keys move between options and Enter or Space chooses one.
• Text size, line height, letter spacing, word spacing and line width have no fixed list of values. Each has − and + buttons (hold one to keep stepping), a field where you can type a number and press Enter, and a Site default button. Changes show at once and are saved a moment after the last one.
• The panel follows your own text size, font, spacing and colours. Alignment, line width, link and image options and the reading guide are not applied to the panel itself.
• Profiles: one-click bundles of settings (Dyslexia, Focus, Low vision, Seizure-safe).
• Settings can start from the device's reduced-motion and contrast preferences.

Setting	Choices
Text size	Any percentage up to 1000% (steps of 10; default 100%), with quick picks 100%, 125%, 150%, 200%, 250% and 300%. The whole page scales in proportion.
Font	Site default; the device's sans-serif, serif and monospace fonts; Atkinson Hyperlegible, Lexend, OpenDyslexic Alta and Comic Neue (included); Japanese UD Gothic, Japanese UD Mincho and Japanese textbook (device fonts); fonts uploaded by the administrator. Each option is shown in its own font.
Spacing: line height	Site default, or any value from 0 to 10 in steps of 0.1 (typed values to 0.01). Paragraph spacing follows the line height.
Spacing: letter spacing	Site default, or any value from −5 to 5 em in steps of 0.01 em
Spacing: word spacing	Site default, or any value from −10 to 10 em in steps of 0.02 em
Alignment	Site default, Left, Centre, Right, Justified
Colours	Site default, High contrast, Yellow on black, Black on white, Cream, Dark, the site's own schemes, and Custom (your own background, text and link colours, adjusted to a 7:1 contrast ratio unless you keep your exact colours)
Line width	Full width, or any width from 1 to 300 characters in steps of 5
Links	Off, Underlined, Underline and outline, Highlighted
Images	Shown, Dimmed, Hidden (alt text shown)
Guide	Off, Reading ruler, Reading mask
Motion	On, Stopped
Read	Off, Read aloud bar shown (the browser's own voices, sentence by sentence; no visual highlight yet)
Saturation	Normal, Low, Greyscale, High
Focus ring	Standard, Strong, Extra thick
Cursor	Standard, Large, Extra large

The ranges include the WCAG 1.4.12 text spacing values (line height 1.5, letter spacing 0.12, word spacing 0.16). The lower ends above (negative spacing, line heights under 1, text size and line width down to 1) apply while the administrator's Limits of number settings is Unlimited, the default.

Included fonts

Atkinson Hyperlegible, Lexend and Comic Neue (regular and bold) are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. OpenDyslexic Alta (regular, bold and italic) is OpenDyslexic 2 by Abelardo Gonzalez, with a single-storey "a": the original Bitstream glyphs are under the Bitstream Vera licence and the OpenDyslexic changes under CC BY 3.0. Licence texts are in fonts/, sources in thirdpartylibs.xml.

The device fonts are font stacks: nothing is downloaded, and a device without any font in a stack shows its own default font of that kind.

Settings for administrators

Under Site administration > Plugins > Local plugins > Accessibility:

• Where users open the panel from (floating button, user menu, or both) and whether Alt+A is active.
• Site defaults for each setting, with a lock per tile so that everyone uses the default. Line height, letter spacing and word spacing have a default each and share one lock, Lock Spacing (lock_spacing). The defaults of text size, line height, letter and word spacing and line width are whole numbers in the stored units (percent, hundredths, hundredths of an em, characters), or empty for the normal value.
• Limits of number settings (numericlimits): Unlimited (the default) lets users choose negative letter and word spacing, which squeezes text together, and a line height under 1.0, which makes lines overlap. Non-negative keeps spacing at zero or more, line height at 1.0 or more, and text size and line width at 10 or more. Changing it does not rewrite saved settings: a saved value outside the limits is ignored and the site default is used instead.
• Fonts users may choose (fonts_available): which included and device fonts the Font view offers. All are offered by default; the site font always is.
• Uploaded fonts (fonts_uploaded): up to 20 font files (.woff2, .woff, .ttf or .otf) offered as extra fonts. The file name sets the family and face: the part before the first hyphen or underscore is the family name, a rest containing "Bold" makes a bold face and one containing "Italic" or "Oblique" an italic face. For example Family-Regular.woff2 and Family-Bold.woff2 make one font, Family, with two faces. Names may use only letters, digits, spaces, dots, hyphens and underscores; other files are ignored. Check that each font's licence allows serving it on the web, and delete a file to stop offering it. Uploaded fonts are served without a login, so they also work on the login page, and only font files from this setting are served.
• Site colour schemes (each is checked for contrast) and your own profiles.
• Features page: enable, disable and order the features.

Guests

Visitors who are not logged in keep their settings in a cookie (local_accessibility) in their own browser. Nothing is stored on the server for them. Logged-in users' settings are stored as user preferences.

Known limitations

• Line height, letter spacing and word spacing do not yet apply to headings.
• Content inside iframes (including H5P) is not changed.
• The Moodle mobile app does not load the plugin.
• The colour contrast guarantee covers only the surfaces the plugin recolours. Content with its own colours, such as images or embedded media, is not guaranteed.
• At 200% text with extra spacing on a very narrow screen (320 px), some Moodle controls that never wrap (dropdown buttons, badges, Timeline event names on the Dashboard) can make the page scroll sideways.
• Read aloud uses the browser's own voices. In a browser with no voices installed the tile is hidden.

Upgrading from 2.x

Existing users' settings are carried over. Moodle 4.5 or later is required. Text size, line height and letter spacing keep their value, rounded to a whole percent or hundredth; paragraph widths of 25, 50 and 75 become line widths of 50, 60 and 70 characters; highlighted links become Underline and outline and hidden images Hidden (alt text shown).

The upgrade uninstalls an old accessibility_* widget plugin only when its folder is already gone from local/accessibility/widgets/. If the old widget folders are still there after the upgrade (for example after a git pull, or after unpacking 3.0 over the old folder), delete each local/accessibility/widgets/<name>/ folder, keeping widgets/README.md, then uninstall the leftover widgets under Site administration > Plugins > Plugins overview.

Installing

Install from a ZIP file via Site administration > Plugins > Install plugins, or put the contents of this directory in {your/moodle/dirroot}/local/accessibility and run

$ php admin/cli/upgrade.php

Credits

• Adam Jenkins, maintainer and author of the 3.0 rebuild.
• Ponlawat Weerapanpisit, original author of the plugin and its widget framework.
• Bartlomiej Jencz, for the 2024 work on moving the plugin to Moodle's hooks API.

License

2023 Ponlawat Weerapanpisit [e-mail] 2026 Adam Jenkins [e-mail]

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.