WordPress plugin

Content adjustment tools

Full guide to the AccessYes content adjustment tools: font size, readable font, letter spacing, line height, font weight, text alignment, and highlight options.

Updated

In this article: What each content adjustment tool does, who benefits from it, and how they interact. Covers font size, readable font, letter spacing, line height, font weight, text alignment, and the highlight tools.

The content adjustment section of the AccessYes widget gives visitors control over how text is presented. These tools work by injecting styles into the page — they do not modify your site’s source code or database, and they have no effect on visitors who do not use them.

All adjustments are saved to the visitor’s browser and persist across pages and sessions.

Font size

The font size control lets visitors increase or decrease the base text size using + and – buttons. Each press adjusts the size in increments. The change cascades through the page, scaling body text, paragraphs, and most inline elements proportionally.

Font size is the most commonly used content adjustment. Visitors with low vision, older visitors, and anyone reading on a small screen may need text larger than your site’s default to read comfortably.

The control does not enforce a maximum size — visitors can scale up as much as they need. If a very large font size breaks your layout, this is worth testing before launch. Most modern responsive layouts handle font scaling gracefully, but fixed-width containers can overflow.

Readable font

The readable font tool switches body text to the OpenDyslexic typeface. OpenDyslexic is an open-source font designed to reduce the visual letter-flipping and transposition that some people with dyslexia experience. Each letter has a heavy weighted bottom, making it harder to confuse similar-looking characters such as b, d, p, and q.

The change applies to body copy. Headings, navigation, and UI elements may or may not change depending on how your theme applies font stacks.

OpenDyslexic does not help every person with dyslexia — reading experience is highly individual. But for visitors who benefit from it, this tool gives them control without requiring a browser extension or operating system-level change.

Highlight titles

When enabled, the highlight titles tool adds a visible background highlight to every heading element on the page (<h1> through <h6>). This makes the structure of long pages immediately clearer at a glance.

Visitors with cognitive disabilities, ADHD, or low vision often rely more heavily on heading structure to navigate content. If headings do not stand out visually from body text, scanning a page becomes much harder. Highlighting makes the hierarchy immediately obvious.

This tool works independently of your theme’s heading styles. It adds a background colour on top of your existing heading design rather than replacing it.

The highlight links tool makes all hyperlinks on the page more visually prominent. It adds a background or border treatment to every anchor element, making links easier to distinguish from surrounding text.

On many sites, especially those using light grey or low-contrast link colours, links can be hard to spot for visitors with low vision, colour blindness, or cognitive difficulties. The highlight gives every link a clear visual marker that is independent of colour alone.

Letter spacing

The letter spacing control increases the horizontal space between individual characters (CSS letter-spacing). This can improve readability for visitors who find tightly set text harder to process, including those with dyslexia.

Research into reading and dyslexia has found that wider letter spacing reduces crowding — the visual interference between adjacent characters — and can improve reading speed and accuracy for some readers. The tool increases spacing in steps; visitors can adjust until the text feels comfortable.

Line height

The line height control increases the vertical space between lines of text (CSS line-height). Dense paragraphs with tight leading are harder to read for many visitors, particularly those with low vision who need to track across long lines, and those with cognitive or attention-related differences who can lose their place between lines.

Increasing line height gives each line more breathing room, making it easier to move from the end of one line to the beginning of the next without losing your place. This is sometimes called “leading” in typography.

Font weight

The font weight tool bolds all text on the page. Thicker strokes are easier to see at lower contrast and for visitors with visual acuity differences.

Many sites use light or thin font weights for aesthetic reasons. While these look elegant at large sizes on high-resolution displays, they can be very difficult to read for visitors using older screens, those with low vision, or anyone in a brightly lit environment. The font weight tool overrides the site’s type weight to make all text heavier.

Align left

The align left tool overrides centred, justified, or right-aligned text and forces it to left-aligned. For visitors who read left to right, left alignment is generally the easiest to read because:

  • Every line starts at the same horizontal position, so there is no visual searching for the start of the next line
  • Justified text creates uneven spacing between words (“rivers” of white space) that can be visually disorienting
  • Centred blocks of body text require more eye movement

The tool targets paragraphs and body copy. It does not affect elements that are intentionally centred for layout purposes such as page headings, captions, or UI components — only text content.

How tools interact

Content adjustment tools can be combined freely. A visitor might increase font size, enable readable font, and increase line height simultaneously. Each tool applies its own style independently.

If a visitor activates the Cognitive Disability profile, that profile already enables readable font and highlight titles. The visitor can still adjust font size and line height on top of the profile.

Can site owners disable these tools?

Every content adjustment tool can be individually enabled or disabled from AccessYes → Features in the WordPress admin. Disabling a tool removes it from the widget panel.

Important

Only disable a tool if it causes a genuine technical conflict on your site. Removing tools because they change your design reduces the accessibility of your site for visitors who depend on those adjustments.