FireEyes
Do you know if your website is accessible? FireEyes is a free accessibility testing tool for web pages. It can provide a detailed report of accessibility errors on any of the pages in your site.
Quick Facts about FireEyes:
- It’s a Firefox add-on that runs with Firebug (a web development tool for Firefox)
- It provides error reports that include details about accessibility violations and excerpts of the HTML code in violation
- It can highlight the specific area of the page where an error is located
- It's free
FireEyes is a part of the WorldSpace suite and has functionality that works hand-in-hand with WorldSpace Sync. While the IT Accessibility Team uses WorldSpace Sync to scan Key Public Entry Points (KPEPs), any employee can run an accessibility analysis of any webpage using the FireEyes extension.
Start Using FireEyes
To use FireEyes, Texas A&M employees simply need to create a WorldSpace account and install the FireEyes extension.
Did you know?
- In the United States, about 55 million people have a disability (src: 2010 U.S. Census).
- About 1 in 5 Americans have some kind of disability (src: 2010 U.S. Census).
- The percentage of people affected by disabilities is growing as our population ages.
- Two popular, free screen readers are VoiceOver (Mac OS and iOS) and NVDA (Win).
- Good accessibility practices can improve the search ranking of your website.
- Form fields without labels can cause problems for some assistive technology users.
- Low color contrast makes content difficult to see, especially for users with low vision.
- Documents linked on a website need to be accessible too (e.g., PDF and Word files).
- Audio content, like podcasts, need transcripts for deaf or hard of hearing users.
- Online videos should be captioned for deaf or hard of hearing users.
- Using HTML tags correctly is very important for accessibility.
- Descriptive link text helps make a website more accessible. Avoid using "Click here" or "Read more."
- A "screen reader" is an application that reads content aloud to a user.
- There is no "alt tag" in HTML. "Alt" is an attribute used with the img tag.
- HTML uses the alt attribute to provide a text description of an image.
- Alt text should describe an image, if the purpose of the image is to convey information.
- If an image is a link, the alt text for the image should explain where the link goes.
- If an image is only being used for decoration, the alt text should be null (i.e., alt="").
- If a table has headers, using header tags (<th>) will make the table more accessible.
- An accessible website is one that can be navigated and understood by everyone.