Top 10 Best Accessibility Extensions for Chrome in 2025

Topping our list is Helperbird, an all-in-one powerhouse designed to make the web more accessible and productive for everyone. It's particularly beneficial for users with dyslexia, ADHD, and other learning differences, but its wide range of features can assist anyone looking to customize their reading and writing experience online.

Helperbird stands out due to its comprehensive suite of tools. It integrates Microsoft's Immersive Reader, offers robust text-to-speech capabilities, specialized fonts (including OpenDyslexic), dyslexia rulers, and tools for summarizing and rewording text. Beyond reading assistance, it includes writing aids like voice typing, spell check, and word prediction. The extension also provides visual comfort features such as overlays, color blindness controls, and options to reduce motion or hide images.

It's designed to support various abilities and learning styles, making it a versatile choice. Helperbird offers both free and Pro versions, with the Pro version unlocking more advanced features. The commitment to privacy, with no user data selling and compliance with COPPA, FERPA, and GDPR, adds another layer of trust for its users.

WAVE Evaluation Tool, developed by WebAIM.org, is a highly respected extension for evaluating web accessibility directly within the Chrome browser. It's an indispensable tool for developers, designers, and accessibility auditors aiming to create web content that conforms to WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standards.

WAVE works by injecting icons and indicators directly into your web page, providing visual feedback about the accessibility of your content. It highlights errors that align with WCAG 2.2 failures, as well as features that require human evaluation. While no automated tool can guarantee full accessibility, WAVE facilitates a thorough human-led evaluation process and educates users about common accessibility issues. A key benefit is that all analysis is performed entirely within the browser, ensuring the secure valuation of intranet, local, or password-protected pages.

Regular updates, such as compatibility with Manifest v3 and refinements in contrast checking and ARIA support, ensure the tool remains current with evolving web standards and practices. Its detailed reporting and clear visual cues make it easier to understand and address accessibility barriers.

Developed by Microsoft, Accessibility Insights for Web is a powerful and user-friendly extension designed to help developers find and fix accessibility issues in their web applications and websites. It offers a streamlined approach to accessibility testing, combining automated checks with guided manual testing.

The extension provides two primary modes: "FastPass" and "Assessment." FastPass is a quick, two-step process that helps developers identify many common, high-impact accessibility issues in less than five minutes. This includes automated checks for compliance with over 50 accessibility requirements and a manual test for keyboard navigation. The "Assessment" mode offers a more comprehensive evaluation, guiding users through a series of tests to ensure compliance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA success criteria. It provides clear instructions and allows users to record their findings.

Accessibility Insights for Web is praised for its clear guidance, actionable recommendations, and integration into development workflows. It empowers teams to build more inclusive products by making accessibility testing more approachable and efficient. The default keyboard shortcut [Ctrl+Shift+K] provides quick access to its features.

Night Shift Mode focuses on visual accessibility by allowing users to adjust screen brightness and color temperature to reduce eye strain, especially during nighttime browsing or in low-light conditions. While not a direct WCAG compliance tool, it significantly enhances user comfort and can be a vital accessibility aid for individuals sensitive to bright screens or blue light.

The extension changes the screen's colors to warmer, eye-protective shades. Users can choose from a predefined list of colors or select a custom color. It also offers the ability to schedule the night mode automatically or apply specific color themes to certain websites. This customization helps in minimizing digital fatigue and can contribute to better sleep quality by reducing blue light exposure in the evenings, which can suppress melatonin production.

By dimming harsh light and shifting towards warmer tones, Night Shift Mode makes extended screen use more comfortable. It’s particularly beneficial in dimly lit environments, preventing eye strain and potential disruption to others.

OpenDyslexic for Chrome is a dedicated accessibility tool that enhances readability for users with dyslexia. It reformats web pages by replacing existing fonts with the OpenDyslexic font, which is specifically designed to mitigate common reading difficulties associated with dyslexia, such as letter jumbling or rotation.

The OpenDyslexic font achieves this through unique letter shapes and a heavier bottom, creating a "gravity" effect that helps anchor letters and improve recognition. This design aims to reduce confusion between similar letterforms and make the reading process smoother and less frustrating. The extension offers a simple toggle to apply the font across all websites, providing immediate relief for users who benefit from this typeface.

Maintained with a focus on accessibility, OpenDyslexic is a free, open-source font. The extension serves as a practical way to leverage this font while browsing. It's a straightforward solution that addresses a specific but significant accessibility need, making online content more accessible to a wider audience.

axe DevTools - Web Accessibility Testing is a robust extension for developers, testers, and designers, aimed at finding and fixing accessibility issues during the website development lifecycle. Powered by Deque's axe-core engine, the world’s most trusted accessibility testing engine, it helps teams build more inclusive digital experiences.

The free version of axe DevTools offers powerful automated testing capabilities. With a single click, it analyzes your site and highlights common accessibility problems, often finding significantly more issues than other automated tools. A key strength is its claim of "no false positives," saving developers time by ensuring they only address genuine issues. Each identified issue comes with details, source code inspection, and extensive remediation guidance. For more advanced testing without deep accessibility expertise, the Pro version offers Intelligent Guided Testing™ (IGT), component-level testing, and export/sharing features.

The tool emphasizes proactive accessibility, enabling teams to catch and fix bugs early, reducing the need for extensive manual testing later and minimizing the risk of accessibility-related legal issues. Its focus on accuracy and actionable feedback makes it a valuable asset in any development toolkit.

The WCAG Color contrast checker is a specialized tool designed to help web designers and developers ensure that text and interactive elements on their web pages meet the color contrast requirements set by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. Proper color contrast is crucial for users with low vision or color vision deficiencies.

This extension evaluates the contrast between foreground (text) and background colors for all elements on a page, considering their computed CSS styles. It smartly handles RGBA colors, taking opacity into account to determine the final displayed color. A standout feature is its ability to simulate various types of color blindness (e.g., Protanopia, Deuteranopia, Tritanopia, Achromatopsia) and evaluate contrast under these simulations, allowing developers to see their pages as colorblind users might. Users can also manually input colors or use a color picker to test specific combinations. The tool can auto-refresh its analysis when the page's DOM changes, though this can be deactivated for highly dynamic pages.

It provides a practical way to quickly assess and address one of the most common and impactful accessibility barriers.

Use Immersive Reader on Websites is an unofficial extension that aims to bring the functionality of Microsoft's Immersive Reader to any webpage. Immersive Reader is a well-regarded tool known for improving reading comprehension and focus by providing features like text decoding, line focus, and parts of speech highlighting.

This extension allows users to select text on a webpage, right-click, and then open that text within the Immersive Reader interface. This can be incredibly helpful for individuals with dyslexia, ADHD, or anyone who prefers a cleaner, more focused reading environment. It strips away distracting elements from a webpage, presenting the content in a simplified format with various customization options for font size, spacing, and background color.

While the extension is not published or endorsed by Microsoft, it attempts to make a valuable accessibility feature more widely available. Its utility lies in its simplicity and the proven benefits of the Immersive Reader experience for enhancing readability and comprehension across diverse web content.

Pixie Reader positions itself as an all-in-one accessibility and productivity suite, with a standout feature: Text-to-Speech (TTS) that claims to correctly read mathematical equations. This makes it particularly interesting for students and professionals dealing with STEM content.

The extension offers a broad range of tools, including advanced TTS in 54 languages, various reading voices, paragraph highlighting, and word underlining. For visual comfort and reading support, it includes 10 dyslexia-friendly fonts (like OpenDyslexic), text size and spacing adjustments, a screen shader, a smart reading ruler, and high contrast modes. It also supports ePub files with full accessibility features enabled and integrates into the browser's side panel for easy access.

Pixie Reader emphasizes privacy with minimal data collection. However, it's important to note that while it offers a rich feature set, several user reviews indicate a shift to a subscription model, with many previously free features now behind a paywall.

The Siteimprove Accessibility Checker is another tool designed to help users assess the accessibility of web pages directly within Chrome. It provides an instant analysis of a webpage, identifying issues based on the latest ACT (Accessibility Conformance Testing) rules, which are a foundation for WCAG conformance.

This extension aims to give users a quick overview of accessibility problems, with clear explanations of how each detected issue might affect visitors with disabilities. It also offers hands-on guidance and recommendations on how to fix the issues, including links to relevant WCAG techniques. Like other browser-based checkers, it can be used to evaluate password-protected or non-public pages, multi-step forms, and dynamic content securely within the browser environment.

Siteimprove is a known name in the digital presence optimization space, and this checker is part of their suite of tools to help organizations create more accessible websites. It's intended to be a starting point for accessibility efforts, providing automated feedback to complement manual testing and broader accessibility strategies.