Your browser and your operating system already ship an accessibility toolkit. Most people never find it.
That is the gap this Field Guide fills. Every page here points you at a switch that already exists on your own device — read this page aloud, translate it into your language, magnify the words under your pointer, drive your computer by speaking, put captions on anything that makes sound. Free, already installed, and set up the way you set it up.
We could have bolted a widget onto our site instead. We didn’t, and we won’t — here’s why. Overlays layer JavaScript over broken code and get between Disabled people and the tools we already rely on. The settings you have chosen for yourself are almost always better than anything we could impose on top of them.
Our job is to get out of the way and point you to the switch.
On this site: theme, reading font, and text size live behind the Aa Reading button in our header. Those are ours.
On your device: everything below. Those are yours — and they work on every site you read, not only this one.
You don’t need all of it. Find the thing you came for and stop there.
Read with your ears
Ear-reading is reading. Some of us read fastest, longest, or most comfortably with our ears. Plenty of us switch between eyes and ears depending on the day, the text, or how much we have left in the tank. However you get the words in, it counts.
We used to run an audio player on this site. It was costly, it was fussy to maintain, and — the part that bothered us most — it read to you in one voice we picked. Your own browser does the job better, for free, in a voice you choose and at a speed you set.
Every major browser can read a page aloud with no add-on. Every major operating system can read text aloud in any app, not just the web.
→ Ear-Reading: Turn On Text-to-Speech in Your Browser
Read in your language
We used to translate this site with a WordPress plugin. It was slow, it cost money, and keeping it current was endless work, so we retired it.
Your browser translates better than that plugin did, and it translates every other site you read too. Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari all have it built in. Firefox does the whole job on your own device, which means the page you are reading never gets sent to a translation company’s server.
Some browsers offer to translate on their own when a page is not in your language. That offer depends on your browser’s language setting disagreeing with the page — so it never appears for anyone reading on a shared, school, library, or work computer set to someone else’s language. If the offer doesn’t come to you, you can still ask for it. That is what this page is for.
→ Read This Site in Your Language
Make it bigger, make it clearer
The fastest fix is the one your browser already has: hold Command (Mac) or Control (Windows) and press + to zoom the page. It works on every site, and it sticks per site so you only do it once.
Past that, your computer can magnify the text under your pointer and speak it at the same time. Hold a key, move the mouse, and the words under the cursor grow and are read to you. It is a good way through a dense page when you don’t want to commit to listening to the whole thing.
Our own text size control is in the Aa Reading panel in the header, alongside light and dark and eight reading fonts. It scales up from whatever size your browser is already set to, so if you have raised your default, we build on it instead of overriding it.
→ Hover Text and Speak Under the Pointer on macOS
Read it on paper
Some of us read best on paper. No battery, no glare, nothing else on the screen asking for attention. And paper goes where a browser cannot — into a pocket, onto a noticeboard, across a table to somebody who did not come to a website today.
This is the one entry on this page that is half ours. The Print or save as PDF button in the Aa Reading panel is ours: it hands your printer the page’s words, in the font and size you chose, with the site’s menus and footer stripped out. The print settings themselves stay yours — and there is one worth changing.
→ Printing Pages from Stimpunks.org
Control it with your voice
Typing and pointing are not the only ways in. Voice Control lets you run the whole machine by speaking — dictate text, click things by name, scroll, move between apps — with no mouse and no keyboard. It is built into macOS and iOS, it costs nothing, and it needs a one-time download the first time you switch it on.
→ Use Voice Control on macOS
→ Use Voice Control on iOS or iPadOS
See what’s said
Live captions transcribe whatever your computer is playing, as it plays, whether or not the app itself offers captions. macOS and Windows both do this at the system level.
We lean on it for our Discord video chats, because Discord does not transcribe.
Why we don’t bolt on a widget
Every tool on this page is one you already own. That is the point, and it is a position, not a shortcut.
We are sometimes asked why we don’t install one of the many “ADA compliance” plugins. Most of them are overlays: third-party JavaScript that loads on top of a site and claims to detect and fix accessibility problems automatically. Overlays don’t repair the code underneath. They layer over it, and in doing so they routinely break screen readers, keyboard navigation, and the settings a visitor already configured for themselves. Enough Disabled people have been failed by them that some of us run tools specifically to block overlays from loading at all.
So we build access into the structure instead — semantic markup, working keyboard and screen reader support, and controls that defer to your settings rather than override them. Then we point you at the tools you already have.
Access is infrastructure. It belongs in the foundation, not in a script layered on afterward.