This past weekend, I was looking at a WordPress trac ticket about hover color contrast in the admin. One of the things that was frustrating about this ticket is the amount of labor expected in testing – because accessibility tools mostly test the page as is. It’s certainly possible to implement automated tooling that can look at all of that, but introducing a whole new suite of tests to WordPress core was outside of my area of expertise.

But a bookmarklet felt within my comfort level, as long as I could figure out how to trigger the hover state. Once I found some resources to figure that out, I was on the run.

So, I created the Hover Contrast Bookmarklet. I mentioned this on social media on Sunday, but I’ve updated it since then, so it’s worth another mention.

It had been a long time since I just sat down and worked on a new tool. I almost entirely stopped building new WordPress plugins a few years ago, for the simple reason that I couldn’t take the time to support them. Doing something that doesn’t have any WordPress dependencies and can be just let loose is, honestly, kind of nice.

While a significant percentage of my plugin and WordPress work is still about accessibility, the reality of maintaining large software is that a lot of the labor is about making sure the software works at all. Only a fraction of my time is spent on accessibility-focused features. So this was a fun and welcome change of pace.

Feel free to contribute or use it as is. But please note that this bookmarklet is currently a 100% local bookmarklet, so my updates won’t automatically propagate to your bookmarks. I may change it to store the code in a CDN, but there are advantages to the local execution, since it won’t be blocked by 3rd party content restrictions. You may want to monitor the repository to be aware of updates!