Why We Built an Ultra-Lightweight Accessibility Widget (And Why Developers Love It)
If you’re a web developer, you probably know the feeling. You spend weeks optimizing a client’s website. You lazy-load images, minify your CSS, bundle your JavaScript, and finally get that perfect 99 Lighthouse performance score.
Then, the client says: “Hey, we need to be ADA compliant. I bought this accessibility widget. Install it.”
You drop in the <script> tag. Suddenly, your Lighthouse score drops by 20 points. Your Time to Interactive skyrockets. The site is downloading 150KB+ of obfuscated JavaScript, setting third-party tracking cookies, and monitoring user behavior.
This is the reality of the “Big Accessibility” overlay industry. And it’s broken.
The Problem with “Big Accessibility”
The market is dominated by a few massive players who sell aggressive, expensive subscription packages ($500+ per year) fueled by the fear of ADA compliance lawsuits. To justify these prices, their widgets are bloated with features that often interfere with native screen readers, track users across domains, and severely degrade website performance.
Developers hate them. But businesses buy them because they don’t know there’s another option.
Enter Sienna: The Anti-Bloatware Alternative
We built Sienna because we believe accessibility shouldn’t come at the cost of performance or privacy.
We engineered Sienna with a few strict technical constraints:
- Ultra-lightweight Footprint: It has to be incredibly fast. Delivered via jsDelivr’s global CDN, it executes in under 50ms on most connections.
- Zero Dependencies: No jQuery. No massive frameworks. Just modern, vanilla JavaScript.
- Zero Data Collection: It must never track the user. No cookies, no analytics pixels, no server phone-homes. It runs entirely client-side.
- Transparent Pricing: The core widget must be free and open-source forever. No forced subscriptions.
Better for Users, Better for Developers
By stripping away the bloat, we created a tool that visually assists users (high contrast, text resizing, animation suppression, focus halos) without overriding the native assistive technologies they already rely on.
For developers, it’s a breath of fresh air. You can offer your clients a robust visual accessibility tool that respects user privacy and keeps your Lighthouse scores exactly where they belong: in the green.
Ready to try it? You can deploy Sienna for free in 60 seconds.