Checking web pages for accessibility
Automated testing
- Validators
- W3C X/HTML Validator - a free service that checks Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards.
- W3C CSS Validator - a free service that checks Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in (X)HTML documents or standalone for conformance to W3C recommendations
- Site checkers
- Page checkers
- On-line
- WebXACT - formerly called Bobby, a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility , and privacy issues.
- HiSoftware® Cynthia SaysT Portal - a web content accessibility tool designed to identify errors in content related to section 508 standards and/or the WCAG guidelines.
- WAVE 3.0 Accessibility Tool - exposes errors and highlights content where accessibility considerations require human judgment.
- Stand-alone
Manual testing
- Web sites
- Color Filter - Several filters to manipulate images and other file types to see how they may appear for other users.
- Colour Blindness Simulator - One in twenty people have some form of colour vision deficiency. Etre's Colour Blindness Simulator allows you to upload an image to experience it as colour blind users may. \
- Vischeck - Vischeck is a way of showing you what things look like to someone who is color blind. You can try Vischeck online - either run Vischeck on your own image files or run Vischeck on a web page. You can also download programs to let you run it on your own compute
- Colour Check - Etre's Colour Check determines the colour difference and contrast between any two colours to maximize readability.
- Firefox
- Web Developer Extension - The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools.
- Fangs: The Firefox Screen Reader Emulator - This Mozilla Firefox extension creates a textual representation of a web page similar to how the page would be read by a modern screen reader.
- Fire Vox - Fire Vox is an open source, freely available talking browser extension for the Firefox web browser. Think of it as a screen reader that is designed especially for Firefox.
- Mozilla/Firefox Accessibility Extension - adds features to Mozilla or Firefox to make it easier for people with disabilities to view and navigate web content based on the structural markup used to create the web page. It can also be used by Web developers to check their structural markup.
- Colour Contrast Analyser Firefox Extension - The Colour Contrast Analyser Firefox extension lists colour combinations used in the document in a table that summarizes the foreground colour, background colour, luminosity contrast ratio, and the colour difference and brightness difference.
- Table Inspector Firefox Extension - Table Inspector is a Mozilla - Firefox extension to reveal the hidden accessibility features of data tables, such as summary, headers, axis, scope, and abbr.
- Internet Explorer
- Web Accessibility Toolbar - The Web Accessibility Toolbar is provided by the Accessible Information Solutions (AIS) team of Vision Australia. It has been developed to aid manual examination of web pages for a variety of aspects of accessibility.
- Stand-alone programs
- General
- Lift For Dreamweaver - a production tool that works within the authoring environment offering users powerful features which streamline web page production while ensuring that the content is accessible to standards such as US Section 508 and W3C.
- aDesigner - aDesigner is a disability simulator that helps Web designers ensure that their pages are accessible and usable by the visually impaired. Web developers can use aDesigner to test the accessibility and usability of Web pages for low-vision and blind people. The tool looks at such elements as the degree of color contrast on the page, the ability of users to change the font size, the appropriateness of alternate text for images, and the availability of links in the page to promote navigability. The tool also checks the pages' compliance with accessibility guidelines. 90-day trial.
- Color
- ColorSelector - a tool for developers to help determine the most accessible combinations of background colors and text colors in real time.
- Colour Contrast Analyser - a tool for checking foreground & background colour combinations to determine if they provide good colour visibility for conformance with Checkpoint 2.2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
- ColorDoctor - ColorDoctor is a simulating program that checks accessibility from the aspect of color. It converts any images displayed on the screen into gray scale or colors that person who has color blindness perceives.
This page was last updated on December 19, 2008.
eHelp
