uBlock Origin is an Accessibility Tool
July 31, 2026 | 1m
The internet used to be better. In current year, probably everyone who uses it agrees with that statement, whether out of a sense of nostalgia for times gone by or from the memory of having fun in their favorite digital haunts.
But something that's often overlooked, in my opinion, is accessibility. And I don't just mean for people with disabilities that make its primarily visual and colored interface hard - if not impossible - to navigate. I mean from a general usability standpoint.
The average website these days is a technically and visually bloated mess of increasingly padded and animated contents. Whenever you visit it, you have to wait for everything in it to load, then scroll needlessly large distances to find what you're looking for. But there's no guarantee that you will, since the entire home page is usually just one big ad to use their product and/or stay on their site. Its purpose is to encourage people to engage with it, not to provide a useful service for the person who ultimately accesses it.
I know some people who find it hard to focus on one particular thing when a bunch of stuff is being thrown in their face all at once, which is pretty much what you get with these modern websites. Enter uBlock Origin, widely touted as the best available ad and tracker blocker for web browsers by people who've actually done their homework on such tools.
What a lot of people don't seem to realize is that it's not just an ad and tracker blocker. Its own readme calls it a "wide spectrum content blocker". What this means is that it's capable of blocking so much more. Stuff like, say, popups demanding you subscribe to a newsletter. Or navigation bars that follow you across the page. Or that annoying sidebar that serves no functional purpose other than making the main page area needlessly smaller.
This is extremely useful for someone who prefers to cut through the noise and only receive what they explicitly asked the website for. So, everyone really. More than that, the sheer amount of junk that doesn't even get loaded when this tool is active makes loading times faster and webpages cleaner, making it that much easier for people with disabilities to access them.
If you ask me, more website developers should take the time to ask themselves and their peers if the tools they're using to build it are necessary, if they really need that complex database-powered framework or if a static site generator would do the job better. uBlock should also be supported in all major browsers. The fact that Google unilatterally decided not to support its Manifest V2 dependency in its Chromium base anymore, effectively neutering it in all web browsers built on Chromium (all but a tiny few of them), is a tragic loss for accessibility on the internet.
But there are still havens for it, if you care to look beyond the defaults presented to you. I have strived to make my website one on which the use of a tool such as uBlock Origin is unnecessary, and I welcome suggestions for additional improvements. Because accessible design doesn't happen in a vacuum. We all need to raise our voices to make it a reality.