I’m regularly asked to take a look at plugins and see how good, bad, or ugly they are in terms of accessibility. This is the review for the Simple TOC plugin that offers easy adding of a table of contents to a post or page.
Overall opinion: Good. This is easy to use and produces accessible code.
This is not an exhaustive review of the plugin, but from the testing that we as well as others have done of this plugin, it has been found to be good to use.
Responsive developer
The developer of Simple TOC has been very responsive to any accessibility issues and corrected them. This is such a rare find in a developer of a free plugin (and even many paid products).
Does SimpleTOC have any information about accessibility?
It doesn’t include any information about accessibility. That does demonstrate that some plugins that may be accessible are not specifically listed as such. It does make our jobs as website developers a bit more challenging, and it would be nice to see at least some mention of accessibility in the block information.
The plugin inherits your styles
I can’t even count how many times I’ve had to write CSS to override a plugin that overrode my theme settings. I work hard to use themes, like the Kaya theme, that include accessibility in the theme. It can be a real fight with some plugins that try to override my theme code, because what they are doing is generally wrong.
So, it’s particularly nice that the SimpleTOC plugin inherits the styles from my theme.
The one downside: it’s only a block
I understand why the developer chose the approach of making the plugin a block, but that does mean it can’t easily be applied site wide. For a new site, it’s not too much effort to add it to articles. However, for an existing site with hundreds or thousands of articles, this is not a solution to add a table of contents site wide.
If you are using a block theme and have built a block template for your posts, then you may be able to add this site wide.
Overall summary
The plugin uses an <h2> for the heading, and has the ability to customize it or remove it. It allows you to choose what heading levels are and are not included in your table contents. For the most part I normally only include <h2> and <h3> in tables of contents.
The table itself is coded as an unordered list, which is useful for screen readers to be able to navigate.
The jump links from the table to the section of content move the user’s focus along with scrolling the page. This is great. It even works when you turn on the smooth-scroll feature within the plugin. I was surprised by that, since usually plugins that have smooth-scroll do not move focus.