Naw, these are extremely frustrating. They make navigating websites super difficult for anyone using a screen reader. Websites are supposed to have a certain level of accessibility by law that 97% of them don’t follow.

They are legally required to have that banner. Sorry.

I’ve installed the extension they said, now I can’t access their website 🙂

OK, replying to myself here rather than individually, as it seemed easier… Maybe I should have posted this to c/mildlyironic, but that’s what caught my attention. There’s no easy way to specify what I consent too here—their ToS, tracking cookies, it’s all or nothing†. And this is a legal requirement only if you’re storing cookies. If your website will work without cookies, just get rid of them instead of asking. If it won’t, make this the landing page and see how much traffic you get (note this would also help with accessibility).

I do use consent-o-matic, but it didn’t help with this one. Never mind, I’m no stranger to devtools, and see this eventually as just a challenge. This site though was pretty tricky. First usual trick is to right click and ‘Inspect’ the overlay, with a view to, ahem, closing it. But this isn’t gadgethacks first rodeo—no, they have a page level click handler installed which repeats the small print, and ends with a double negative “If you do not agree, click Cancel”. There’s no way back to read the ToS or privacy policy without reloading the page.

Oh well, lets start again and open devtools. The content is structured in 3 main bits: a <header>, a <section class="page-wrapper"> and a <footer>. Well, that’s not too bad, so we can safely delete the header & footer, and that also gets rid of the click handler. Now just a simple matter or finding where overflow: hidden is buried (only 1 div down), and a pesky position: fixed alongside it, and voila we have scroll bars.

I could read all the way to the end of the article, and guess what? It didn’t need cookies after all.

† Perhaps their ToS requires the use of cookies, but, TL;DR;, it doesn’t.