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Closed 6 years ago.

I am working for a public service website and we really need a text-only version of the website, or a black and white version, for people with special needs.

Is there any plug-in or script that can do this? Thank you so much!

Asking to recommend a product (plugin, theme, book, hosting provider), tool, library, or off-site resource is out of scope for this site, as it attracts opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.

Closed 6 years ago.

I am working for a public service website and we really need a text-only version of the website, or a black and white version, for people with special needs.

Is there any plug-in or script that can do this? Thank you so much!

• plugins

3 Answers 3

If you wanted to remove all colorful text from your site, you could use a global CSS rule, as in

* {color:black !important; background-color:white !important}

which should turn all text to black on white background. (The '*" should apply to all CSS elements.) That wouldn't get rid of images or other things, so you might add this for images

img {display:none !important;}

And then add additional elements as needed.

The problem with this is that it would affect the entire site, so you would need to have a way to change the theme on the fly just for the text-only users. That's not easy to do, I think.

Maybe create another WP installation that uses the same database, but set up a theme for that new site that adds the above CSS and others as needed. The new site would be at https://www.example/textonly , for example. You'd also need to copy the plugins folder to the new site.

Probably some additional tweaks needed, but that might get you started.

Added

As I think about the duplicate site/same database idea, with the duplicate site using a different theme, there might be an issue.

The active theme is stored in wp-options table (I think), so a shared database couldn't have a different theme.

So you would need to use a hook to change the theme name (and location) during the very first part of the page load process. You would still need a separate install with the shared database, but the hook would load a different theme.

Perhaps function that uses a hook that would change the theme name (and location) is all that is needed. The hook would look at the page's query parameter (say https://www.example/some-page?theme=textonly )and inspect the 'theme' query parameter to decide which theme to load.

I don't think that a query parameter that specifies a theme name is available in WP core - although that would be a great idea; very useful for testing new themes on an active site, which some people would like to do.

But perhaps my random thoughts might get you going into a direction that will meet your needs. I'd be interested in other thoughts about this.

Added More

So, digging around possible hooks, I came up with the 'setup_theme' hook, in the wp-settings.php around line 407. A bit later in that file (around line 438) (line numbers are there from my copy/paste from the code):

// Load the functions for the active theme, for both parent and child theme if applicable.
439 if ( ! wp_installing() || 'wp-activate.php' === $pagenow ) {
440         if ( TEMPLATEPATH !== STYLESHEETPATH && file_exists( STYLESHEETPATH . '/functions.php' ) )
441                 include( STYLESHEETPATH . '/functions.php' );
442         if ( file_exists( TEMPLATEPATH . '/functions.php' ) )
443                 include( TEMPLATEPATH . '/functions.php' );
444 }

So, it would seem that by changing the TEMPLATEPATH and STYLESHEETPATH constants, we could change the theme being used.

So, psuedocode:

add_action('setup_theme', 'my_use_different_theme');
function my_use_different_theme() {
  TEMPLATEPATH = "path/to/the/other/theme/templates';
  STYLESHEETPATH = "path/to/the/other/theme/styles";
return;
}

Might allow you to create a function that would add the action if the query parameter contained a value like 'theme=newtheme', where 'newtheme' is name of the theme you want to use. Psuedocode:

$themename = "get/the/query/value";
if ($themename =='newtheme') {
  add_action('setup_theme', 'my_use_different_theme');
}

which would call our 'my_use_different_theme' function if the query parameter for the page was theme=newtheme .

Sounds like your actual goal is accessibility. You should check out WCAG 2.0 standards to see what they recommend. But the short answer is no, there's not a good way to automagically make your site accessible. You could also use the WAVE scanner to find out what you need to fix on a specific page.

I really like this plugin: https://it.wordpress/plugins/wp-accessibility-helper/

It has many features, unload CSS included.