Silktide

The Silktide Toolbar is a Chrome extension for checking the page you are looking at. It opens in Chrome's side panel, beside the page, and adds a small Silktide toggle to each page you visit. It needs Google Chrome 116 or later.

Open and close the panel

The on-page toggle is a button named Open Silktide Toolbar accessibility checker. When Silktide has found issues on the page, its name ends with "to view issues on this page". Press it to open the side panel, and press it again to close the panel.

The toggle comes after the page's own content in the Tab order, so from the keyboard, Tab past the end of the page to reach it. To move focus between the page and the side panel, use Chrome's keyboard shortcuts for moving between parts of the window. See Chrome keyboard shortcuts.

Remove and restore the on-page toggle

When you point at the toggle or move focus to it, a small Remove Silktide Toolbar button (×) appears beside it. Removing the toggle takes two presses, so it never happens by accident:

Press Remove Silktide Toolbar. It changes to Confirm removing Silktide Toolbar from every page (✓).
Press it again within 4 seconds to remove the toggle from every page.

If you wait longer than 4 seconds, press Escape, or move focus away, the button goes back to its first step and nothing is removed. Press Escape while pointing at the toggle to hide the × button.

To bring the toggle back, select the Silktide Toolbar button in Chrome's toolbar. If it is not pinned there, find it under Chrome's Extensions button. The same button hides the toggle again, with no time limit.

Use the panel with the keyboard

Every part of the side panel works with the keyboard:

Tab and Shift+Tab move between controls, and the control with focus shows a visible outline.
Enter or Space presses buttons and expands or collapses issue rows. Space turns switches on or off.
Sliders move with the arrow keys, Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End.
The account menu opens with Enter. The arrow keys move through it, and Escape closes it and returns focus to its button.
Opening a check's details moves focus to its heading.
The number of open issues beside a check is a button of its own. Press it to read what that kind of issue means, and press Escape to close the explanation and return to the number.

Each screen you reach from the panel's navigation rail has navigation, main, and footer landmarks and a main heading. To skip past the navigation rail, move to the main landmark or the first heading. Buttons that show only an icon have text names.

Scan progress and results counts are written to live regions, so your screen reader can announce them without moving your focus.

Choose your look

The first time you open the panel, Choose your look asks how you want it to appear. To change your choices later, open the account menu and choose Theme.

Appearance: Auto follows your device's light or dark setting. Light and Dark override it.
Theme: Silktide, Aqua, Glade, Dune, or Velvet. Each one has a light and a dark version.
High contrast: Auto follows your device's contrast setting, such as Increase contrast on a Mac. On always uses high contrast, and Off never does.
Motion: Auto follows your device's reduce motion setting. Reduced turns off animation that is not essential, and Full keeps it on.
Text size: a slider with seven sizes. The largest makes text a little more than twice its default size.

Select Use this theme to keep your choices, or Reset to default to go back to the defaults. These settings apply to the side panel only. The Silktide web app has its own; see Accessibility features.

The Screen reader tool simulates a screen reader on the page you are checking. While it is open, these keys control it:

Key	What it does
Right arrow / Left arrow	Next or previous element
Space	Select this element
Escape	Leave this element
D / Shift+D	Next or previous landmark
H / Shift+H	Next or previous heading
K / Shift+K	Next or previous link
F / Shift+F	Next or previous form field
M / Shift+M	Next or previous main region
N / Shift+N	Next or previous navigation

The letter keys are single-key shortcuts. They are on by default, and they never fire while you are typing in a field. If you use speech input, or if they get in your way, turn them off: in the Screen reader tool, open Settings and turn off Single-key shortcuts. While they are off, the letters reach the focused control as ordinary typing, and the tool's How to use a screen reader screen says so. The arrow keys, Space, and Escape keep working.

Tools that change the page

Impaired vision, Color blindness, and Dyslexia simulators change how the page looks, to show how it can appear to other people. The Dyslexia simulator moves letters around. Set its Severity to Off to stop it.
Color contrast lets you type a hex color code or adjust each color with sliders, so you do not need to point at the page to pick a color.

Heatmaps on the page

When Silktide has analytics for the page, the Analytics screen has a Heatmaps on this page section with three switches: Clicks, Scroll depth, and Frustration. Each one draws its heatmap over the page itself, and a legend for it appears under the switch.

The drawings are a picture for sighted users. They are hidden from screen readers, never take keyboard focus, and leave the page's own content as it was. The click and frustration results are also in the panel as text:

With Clicks on, Most clicked lists the page's most-clicked elements with their number of clicks.
With Frustration on, Most frustrating lists the elements where visitors showed the most frustration, such as repeated clicks, with their number of events.
Press an element in either list to outline it on the page and scroll it into view. Press it again to let go of it.

Leaving the Analytics screen takes the drawings off the page.

Language

When the panel is available in more than one language, open the account menu and choose yours.

Something not working?

If the Toolbar does not work with your keyboard, screen reader, or other assistive technology, tell us.