Accessibility Friction Overlay
Merchant-facing accessibility friction monitoring for OpenCart with a live dashboard and preview walkthroughs.
A lightweight OpenCart 4 extension that passively collects coarse accessibility friction signals on the storefront, keeps them in a short-lived local buffer, and turns them into merchant-friendly admin insights without adding visible shopper UI.
Features
Merchant-focused diagnostics without storefront clutter.
Live Admin Dashboard
Track recent accessibility friction events, hotspots, and recommendations in a merchant dashboard designed to feel native inside OpenCart admin.
Passive Storefront Monitor
The storefront collector runs silently in the background. Shoppers do not see a widget, overlay, chat bubble, or injected accessibility toolbar.
Preview Walkthroughs
Simulate realistic scenarios like checkout friction, keyboard audits, catalog walkthroughs, payment failures, and mobile tap audits without waiting for live traffic.
Short-Lived Local Storage
Signals are written to a temporary local file buffer only. No custom OpenCart database tables, external queue, or analytics warehouse are required.
Privacy-First Collection
No typed form values, passwords, session replay streams, or invasive personal analytics are captured by the extension.
OpenCart Native UI
Built with Bootstrap 5 inside the OpenCart admin so the extension looks and behaves like part of the platform instead of a foreign control panel.
How it works
From passive storefront signals to useful merchant insight.
- 01
A shopper interacts with the storefront
The passive frontend script listens for coarse friction indicators such as repeated focus changes, stalled flows, or navigation trouble without recording sensitive content.
- 02
A lightweight event is sanitized
Only the safe, high-level metadata needed for merchant insight is normalized and filtered before it can be stored or displayed.
- 03
The event enters the live buffer
The extension writes recent signals into a short-lived local buffer in OpenCart storage so merchants can inspect current friction without maintaining a data warehouse.
- 04
The dashboard renders insights
OpenCart admin reads the recent event stream, groups it into useful categories, and surfaces trends, hotspots, and recommendations for follow-up.
- 05
Preview mode helps with validation
Store owners can run synthetic preview scenarios to verify the dashboard experience and train teams even when the store has no real traffic yet.
Privacy and restraint
Built to help merchants investigate friction without drifting into invasive shopper surveillance.
- No typed form values or passwords are captured.
- No session replay or invasive screen recording is involved.
- No custom analytics warehouse, Redis instance, or third-party tracking service is required.
- Signals are stored in a short-lived local buffer instead of permanent long-term event tables.
- The extension is built for merchant diagnostics, not customer profiling.
- Preview mode is admin-only and never appears on the public storefront.
Requirements
| OpenCart | 4.1.x compatible |
| PHP | 8.3 or higher |
| Storage | Writable OpenCart storage cache or temp directory |
| Database | No custom extension tables required |
| Services | No Node.js, Redis, or external queue required |
| Admin UI | OpenCart admin with Bootstrap 5 styling |
Installation
- 01 Download the OpenCart extension package from the marketplace or your release artifact.
- 02 In OpenCart admin, go to Extensions -> Installer and upload the .ocmod.zip package.
- 03 After upload, open Extensions -> Extensions and choose Modules.
- 04 Find Accessibility Friction Overlay, click Install, then click Edit.
- 05 Grant the needed access and modify permissions to your admin user group if required.
- 06 Use Preview Mode to simulate sample friction scenarios and validate the dashboard immediately.
Frequently asked questions
Does this add a visible accessibility widget to the storefront?
No. The extension monitors passively and does not inject a shopper-facing overlay, toolbar, or floating button.
Does it require a separate analytics service?
No. It runs entirely inside OpenCart using local storage and built-in platform capabilities. No third-party analytics account is needed.
What kind of data does it avoid collecting?
It avoids typed form values, passwords, session replay footage, and invasive long-term customer profiling data. The goal is actionable merchant diagnostics, not surveillance.
Can I preview the dashboard without real shoppers?
Yes. Preview mode generates synthetic scenarios so merchants and QA teams can inspect the dashboard before the store has real accessibility signal traffic.
Will it fit the OpenCart admin visually?
Yes. The admin UI is built around Bootstrap 5 and the native OpenCart admin look so it does not feel like a foreign embedded app.
Ready to audit storefront friction more clearly?
Use a native OpenCart extension instead of bolting on another external analytics tool.
MIT · Developed by Devlin Duldulao