The ATbar is a browser based toolbar to aid accessibility of websites with the option to change the look and feel of webpages through text only enlargement, font style and colour changes plus increased line spacing. There are also features for text to speech, a dictionary, spell checking, word prediction and colour overlays. .
The original toolbar was funded by JISC TechDis as an open source BSD licensed plug-in. Fix the Web collaboration allowed for an additional element to be added to the toolbar – a small heart logo to the right of the ATbar logo. Users of websites can report any issues with accessibility to the Fix the Web team for further checking so contact can be made with the developers.
To date the ATbar has had over 6 million uses with downloads occurring all over the world. This has resulted in requests for versions in different languages and over the last year the toolbar has been adapted to suit the Arabic language thanks to Support from the Mada Centre in Qatar. Ongoing work has include the addition of a market place, services, a wiki and forum all available from the ATbar website
If you are a user, you have a choice of either installing the Lite bookmarklet version that can be accessed within your browser, or a full install which will load automatically for every page. Please visit the download page.
If you manage a website, you can embed ATbar Lite into a link on your website, which will allow your visitors to use ATbar, without installation. For more information, please see the installation instructions otherwise please visit the download page to start using the toolbar. There is a page of brief descriptions about the plugin functions with links to more details instructions on their use from the ATbar wiki.
ATbar is available under the BSD open-source Licence.