WordPress plugin

Enabling and disabling features

How to enable or disable individual AccessYes widget tools and profiles from the WordPress admin. When disabling a feature is justified and the accessibility implications.

Updated

In this article: How to control which tools and profiles appear in the AccessYes widget. Covers the Features settings screen, what happens when you disable a tool, and the situations where disabling is and is not justified.

Every tool in the AccessYes widget is enabled by default. The plugin is designed to offer visitors the full range of accessibility tools without requiring site owners to configure anything first. However, the Features section of the settings screen lets you disable individual tools if there is a specific reason to.

How to enable or disable a feature

  1. Log in to your WordPress admin
  2. Go to AccessYes → Features
  3. Toggle each tool on or off using the switch next to its name

Changes take effect immediately for new page loads. A visitor who already has the widget open will see the change on their next page visit.

There is no save button — settings are saved automatically as you toggle.

What happens when you disable a tool

Disabling a tool removes it from the widget panel. It is not visible to visitors and cannot be activated.

If a visitor had the disabled tool active when you turned it off (their preference was saved in their localStorage), the preference becomes dormant. If you re-enable the tool later, their saved preference will be restored.

Profiles that include a disabled tool continue to function, but the disabled tool is simply not applied when the profile is activated. For example, if you disable Pause animations, the Seizure Safe profile can still be activated but it will not pause animations.

When disabling a feature is justified

The main legitimate reasons to disable a feature are:

Genuine technical conflicts

Some accessibility tools apply CSS that conflicts with a theme’s custom styling in a way that breaks the layout or creates a worse experience than not having the tool at all.

For example:

  • A theme that relies on CSS animations for essential UI transitions (such as opening a mega-menu) may break in an unusable way when pause animations is active
  • A theme using a heavily customised font stack may render the OpenDyslexic typeface in a broken way
  • A theme with explicit right-to-left layout overrides may conflict with the align-left tool

If a tool consistently produces a broken experience on your specific site and you cannot resolve the conflict in your theme, disabling that tool is justified.

How to confirm a conflict

Test the tool on your site before disabling it:

  1. Open your site in a browser
  2. Open the AccessYes widget and activate the tool in question
  3. Navigate to several different page types and layouts
  4. If the result is broken or unusable, the conflict is real

If the result simply changes your design (for example, high contrast removes a background image you like), that is not a technical conflict — that is the tool working as intended.

When disabling a feature is not justified

Visual design preference

The most common reason site owners want to disable tools is that the tools change how the site looks. High contrast removes brand colours. The readable font replaces your chosen typeface. Font size increases break fixed-width containers.

These are not legitimate reasons to remove a tool. The purpose of every tool is to change the site’s presentation in a way that a visitor with a specific need has requested. A visitor using high contrast cannot read your site comfortably without it.

Important

Removing a tool because it changes your design means that visitors who rely on that tool cannot access your content accessibly. This undermines the purpose of the plugin and reduces the accessibility of your site. The right response to a visual design conflict is to fix the underlying CSS issue in your theme, not to disable the tool.

Performance concerns

AccessYes tools apply CSS changes and do not make additional network requests. Disabling tools does not meaningfully improve performance. The full widget JavaScript file is loaded regardless of how many tools are enabled.

Fixing CSS conflicts instead of disabling tools

If a tool causes a conflict in your theme, the better solution is to make your theme CSS more robust rather than removing the tool.

Common fixes:

  • Font size conflicts — use relative units (em, rem, %) instead of fixed px values for container dimensions. When a visitor increases the font size, relative-unit containers grow with the text.
  • Readable font conflicts — scope your theme’s font-family rules to specific elements rather than applying them broadly. The readable font targets body text; tighter scoping reduces conflicts.
  • Pause animations conflicts — if your theme’s navigation relies on CSS animation or transition for essential functionality, check whether prefers-reduced-motion already handles this correctly. If not, update the animation to use transition: none as a fallback.
  • Contrast mode conflicts — if your theme uses background images for content (not decoration), add text alternatives. Contrast modes reduce or remove background images; purely decorative backgrounds are expected to disappear.

If you are unsure how to address a specific conflict, the details of the conflicting tool and your theme’s CSS structure is the starting point for a support request.