Web Accessibility Testing Tools
There are several tools which can help you check the accessibility of your website. The following are a few of the more popular tools currently in use.
HTML/CSS Validators
Web-based Accessibility Evaluators
Browser Extensions
- SiteImprove Accessibility Checker (Chrome, Firefox, and Edge)
- HTML_CodeSniffer (Chrome,Firefox, Safari, and Edge)
- WebAIM's WAVE Toolbar (Chrome, Firefox, and Edge)
- Web Developer Toolbar (Chrome and Firefox)
- aXe: the Accessibility Engine (Chrome, Firefox, and Edge)
- AI Inspector (Firefox)
- tota11y (Chrome)
- Pauljadam Bookmarklets (Chrome,Firefox, Safari, and Edge)
- HeadingsMap (Firefox)
- Colorzilla (Chrome and Firefox)
- Zoom Text only (Chrome)
- Chrome lens (Chrome)
- ARC Toolkit (Chrome)
- High Contrast (Chrome)
Screen Readers
- NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA)
- Free; Open Source; Windows only
- JAWS
- Cost; Demo version available; Windows only
- VoiceOver
- Built into Mac OS X, iOS, and iPod operating systems
- Narrator
- Built into Windows operating system
- Talkback
- Built into Android operating system
Screen Magnifiers
- ZoomText
- Cost; Demo version available; Windows only
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.