Make the Libraries website appear most usable to you!

The Libraries website contains a wealth of online research resources for instructors and students. However, even the best website can sometimes be less than ideal to use, particularly for those with a learning disability that makes it difficult to process written language. Through the Libraries' Readability Widget, the Libraries aims to expand the accessibility and readability of the Libraries’ website.

Our readability widget can be used to view the Libraries website with a warm background, without images, with the OpenDyslexic font, or with highlighted links—or all of the above. The widget makes it easy to toggle these settings on or off anywhere on the Libraries website to find users’ ideal settings.

Designed with help from NC State students (Jordan Birkner ‘23, in particular), the widget is open source, so it can be adapted for any website. And users rely upon it—over the past year, users have toggled its features over 13,000 times.

"What I like best about our readability widget is that it not only can make the Libraries website more accessible and readable, but it also starts a conversation with our users about how we can make our resources work better for them,” says Beth Ashmore, the Libraries’ Associate Head of Acquisitions and Discovery (Serials). “The widget includes a way to provide feedback and the responses that our User Experience team have received have been really enthusiastic. These users will hopefully let us know what else we can do to improve accessibility at the Libraries." 

If this widget sounds useful but wish its features could be used on every website, the Libraries also has a page of other Readability Resources containing some plugins and other resources. All of the resources on the page are free unless noted otherwise, although not every resource has been tested by the Libraries. Ensure that resource can be trusted before installing or recommending it.