The unique open source AtKit extensible toolbar framework helps overcome online exclusion and improve employment opportunities and social participation through user engagement in the building of personalised cross browser toolbars that make websites and services more accessible to all, including the elderly and disabled. The example toolbar includes a choice of font size and a ‘Fix the Web’ menu button launching a form, enabling users to report web site accessibility problems to be discussed with owners. Future extensions include font types, line spacing, text and page colours, magnification, dictionary definitions, text to speech, translation, word prediction and easy reading views.
url of the application: http://www.devx.co.uk/ATBar/
Team members: Seb Skuse, E.A. Draffan, Mike Wald, Russell Newman
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AtKit is an extensible toolbar framework, developed by the University of Southampton for the INCA’10 award. Previously a single toolbar had been made, the JISC TechDis Toolbar, that provided users with a set of accessibility tools – but there was some criticism in that it lacked flexibility and not everyone wanted all the features on the bar, such as magnification, font resizing, text to speech, a dictionary etc.
We decided for the competition to see if we could build a framework from scratch to allow people to build toolbars for their web sites or to choose to personalise a toolbar as a bookmarklet that could sit within any browser they wished to use, with the tools of their choice.
The framework allows cross-browser toolbars to be created with ease, by eliminating the reliance on browser-dependent plugin architectures and instead using a common language for all: JavaScript. When developing a toolbar, the programmer simply needs to tell the page to download the AtKit library, and then sets up some simple JavaScript to define names, logos and finally an array of buttons that they want on their toolbar.
As the project is open-source, we hope that a community will develop around the framework, and the buttons developed by different authors. This will allow people to share their code and work buttons as well as allowing the toolbars to be available in many languages.
An example toolbar can be found at http://www.devx.co.uk/ATBar/. You can either select it, opening it on that page, or add/drag it to your bookmarks bar for later use. As you can see there is limited functionality at this stage, but it is the framework (rather than the currently included features) that we think is ground breaking. Simple to use, no installation, cross browser with flexible personalised features.
The fix the web report form feature in the example toolbar has been developed in collaboration with the fix the web team at http://www.fixtheweb.net/
