Overview

A survey of Ghana's major educational institution websites, together with conversations with students with disabilities, teachers and administrators, found little evidence that WCAG and basic accessibility standards had shaped how those platforms were built. Extabilify is being built to close that gap from inside the browser, with particular attention to students with mobility challenges, who are often left out by assistive technology built almost entirely around sight. See the roadmap for the work in progress beyond the extension itself.

Extabilify is a Manifest V3 browser extension written in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with no build step, no framework and no external dependency. One content script, content.js, runs on every page and does the work. A small service worker handles the right click menu. A popup and an options page hold the controls.

State lives in chrome.storage.local and is applied to every page you open. Nothing is transmitted anywhere. There is no account and no Extabilify server.

The three features you will use most are Voice guide, the screen reader; Voice commands, spoken control of the page; and Smart reading, which repairs pages that were not built for a screen reader and powers quiz mode.

Privacy and offline

• No server, no account, no analytics. Settings and voice profile recordings are stored only in the browser's local extension storage on that device.
• Voice profile recordings never leave the device. They are made by the student in the options page and played back locally.
• Speech recognition is the one exception. The browser SpeechRecognition engine sends audio to the browser vendor's servers in its current default. Chrome version 139 and later can run it on the device, and adopting that is the top roadmap item.
• Text to speech is local. The voice guide and read aloud use the operating system's built in voices.

Voice guide

When it is on, moving the pointer over an element, or tabbing to it, speaks a description built the way the accessible name algorithm prescribes: aria-label first, then an associated label element, then alt or title, then the element's own text. Role and state come after the name, for example "Submit, button, disabled".

Hover delay

A student with a hand tremor whose pointer drifts across several elements hears a cascade of names. Set the hover delay, from 100 to 2000 milliseconds, in the options page, so the guide only speaks once the pointer settles.

Browser zone announcements

When the pointer leaves the page, the guide estimates which part of the browser chrome it entered, such as the address bar, the back button, the tab bar or the window controls.

Voice commands

Turn on Voice commands, then press Alt Shift M, or use the microphone button in the popup, to start listening. It does not stop after one command: it keeps listening, ready for the next one, until you say stop listening or press Alt Shift M again. Every unrecognised command is answered with "I did not understand, say help for a list", never with silence.

Smart reading

When Smart reading is on, Extabilify watches the page as it loads and adds the accessibility information the author left out. Following the first rule of ARIA, it only ever fills gaps, and it marks each element it has touched so a later pass cannot fight it.

Quiz mode

Start with quiz mode or Alt Shift Q. Extabilify reads the current question and its options, then opens the microphone and keeps it open. You never press anything between questions. After a single answer question it moves on automatically. Multi select questions wait for the word next.

Answering

Moving and finishing

Selection works on plain HTML radio buttons, on CSS styled controls where the real input is hidden, on framework controlled inputs such as React and Vue, and on ARIA role="radio" widgets.

Voice profile

In the options page, record your own voice saying each of the seven confirmation phrases, such as "Voice guide is on" and "Done reading". Extabilify stores them locally and plays your recording instead of the synthetic voice whenever it announces a state change. It is a phrase bank, not full speech synthesis, but it is the hook that the future personalised voice work plugs into.

Visual aids and settings

• Sharper screen. High contrast dark rendering that holds up against the high specificity stylesheets on portals such as GES and WAEC.
• Bigger letters. Scales relative unit text from 80 to 200 percent without collapsing fixed layouts.
• Reading space. Line height 1.75, letter spacing 0.02em, word spacing 0.08em, in line with WCAG 1.4.12.
• Clear the page. Hides adverts, navigation, cookie banners and sidebars by structure, so it works on any site, offline.
• Reading voice. Choose the voice, speed and pitch in the options page.
• Highlight colour. Set the hover outline colour, for students with colour vision differences.

Keyboard shortcuts

How pages are understood

To recognise a quiz, Extabilify tries the most reliable signal first and then falls back.

Once a group is found, the question stem is taken from a legend, from an element with a question class, or from the nearest block of text above the options. Options are lettered A, B, C and so on, and each is linked to its question with an aria-label that the voice guide and quiz mode both read.

Standards

The full normative basis ships with the source as docs/STANDARDS.md. In brief:

Extabilify is deliberately not an accessibility overlay. Overlays are installed by the site owner, affect every visitor, and are marketed as compliance products, an approach rejected by the Overlay Fact Sheet and, in the case of one vendor, by the United States Federal Trade Commission. Extabilify is installed by the student, affects only their own session, defers to existing semantics, and makes no compliance claim.

Troubleshooting

Quiz mode read the question but did not select the answer

This was fixed in version 0.3.1. Earlier versions missed CSS styled radio buttons and closed the microphone after one command. Update, and make sure you granted microphone permission when the browser asked.

The microphone stops listening after each command

Also fixed in 0.3.1. Quiz mode now re-opens the microphone automatically as soon as each spoken prompt finishes.

Nothing is read on this page

Turn on Voice guide, and turn on Smart reading for pages without proper markup. Extensions cannot run on browser pages that begin with chrome://, on the Chrome Web Store, or in the PDF viewer.

Voice commands are not supported

You need Chrome or Edge. Firefox keeps speech recognition behind a flag.

It reads too fast, or reads too much

Lower the speech rate in the options page, and raise the hover delay so the guide waits for the pointer to settle.

For developers

Plain JavaScript, no build step. Clone, load unpacked, edit, reload.

Tests run the real content.js in jsdom against fixture quiz pages, covering clean markup, bare markup, and CSS hidden or ARIA controls.

cd tests
npm install jsdom
node test_smart.js           # annotation and structured quiz
node test_voice.js           # quiz-mode continuous listening and auto advance
node test_hidden.js          # styled, hidden and ARIA controls
node test_continuous.js      # general voice commands listening continuously
node test_nonsemantic_page.js # the manual test page below, run headlessly

test-pages/non-semantic-quiz.html is a manual test fixture: a page with no landmarks, no ARIA and five different quiz-markup patterns, for trying smart reading and quiz mode against a page that gives the extension nothing to work with. It documents, in its own comments, which patterns are currently detected and which are not.

Contributions that help students in Ghana and across Africa are welcome.

Changelog

Version 0.3.2

• Voice commands now listen continuously outside quiz mode too. Press Alt Shift M once and it keeps listening for one command after another, with no timer and no need to press it again.
• New command: stop listening (or pause listening) turns the microphone off on request.
• Leaving quiz mode now drops back to continuous general listening, instead of going silent, when voice commands are still turned on.

Version 0.3.1

• Reliable selection of radio buttons and checkboxes, including CSS hidden, framework controlled, and ARIA role="radio" controls.
• Quiz mode keeps the microphone open continuously.
• Forgiving answer parsing. A plain letter, a NATO word, a homophone, a digit, or a full sentence.
• Automatic advance after a single answer question.

Version 0.3.0

• Smart reading engine, with live DOM annotation.
• Quiz mode, with multiple choice detection and hands free answering.

Version 0.2.0

• Voice command navigation engine.
• Personal voice profile recording.
• Configurable hover delay and highlight colour. Text scaling raised to 200 percent.

Version 0.1

• Voice guide, read aloud, high contrast, spacing, focus mode, and browser zone tracking.

All documents

These ship with the source code.