There are many tools that can assist you in checking the accessibility of your website or document. A manual check using the Evaluation Protocol or similar is recommended for completeness.
The WebAIM WAVE tool is a common accessibility evaluation tool. It allows a user to either enter or paste in a public web address that they would like reviewed or click a button if added as a browser extension. It produces a summary of errors, contrast errors, alerts, features, structural elements, and ARIA. It then allows the user to view specific details of the report that will point them to areas of the page in which they are referencing.
In addition to compiling a report of errors and alerts, it also provides references to the user on what the error means, why it is important, short guidelines on how to fix and links to the WCAG standard it violates.
The tool is automated, which means that necessary and important accessibility checks will be missed. The tool should be used in combination with a manual evaluation. It is also important to mention that the tool can scan only one page at a time and assumes small text for contrast-checking purposes.
Deque’s axe DevTools is a browser extension that will automatically scan a webpage for accessibility issues. It produces a summary of issues, their severity, location in the code and on the page, possible solutions, and links to a site that contains more information about that issue.
There is a free and a paid version of axe DevTools. The free version allows you to scan one page at a time. The paid version offers additional guided testing, the ability to save your scans, export and share issues, and scan only part of a page. Currently, the free version of axe DevTools will only check against WCAG 2.1 A and AA criteria.
The tool is automated, which means that necessary and important accessibility checks will be missed. The tool should be used in combination with a manual evaluation. It is also important to mention that the tool can scan only one page at a time and assumes small text for contrast checking purposes.
A screen reader allows users to interact with documents and webpages through text-to-speech output. Screen readers are an important tool when it comes to evaluating the current state of accessibility for a webpage. Although there are many types of screen readers, we will be highlighting the two most popular. It is recommended that you use multiple screen readers when conducting testing to get a more holistic view of the state of accessibility. It is also important to test screen readers across different browsers since they can interact differently in other environments.
NVDA is a free screen reader that has been growing in popularity. In 2019, NVDA surpassed JAWS as the most popular screen reader.
NVDA is free to download and relatively easy to use. It supports 20 different languages and can be downloaded or run through a USB drive without installation.
JAWS, much like NVDA, is a very popular screen reader. It allows for text-to-speech output as well as Braille output. Although it is popular, it is costly. However, you can access the tool on your personal device for free through MSU’s campus license. To get started, visit portal.freedomscientific.com and use your MSU email address to create a portal account. Once you have created an account, you will have the ability to download JAWS to your computer.
Various color contrast checking tools, including WebAIM WAVE above, that "check the whole page" fail to check hover, visited, focus, error and other non-default page content contrasts so you will always need to use something such as the Paciello Group Colour Contrast Analyser to check individual color pairs. For more information on using this tool (or other color contrast tools) see the Colour Contrast Analyser Tutorial.
Bookmarklets can be a quick and easy way to check a page's basic accessibility. They work by using JavaScript to highlight the different roles, states, and properties of accessibility elements on the page. This tool will not identify issues on the page; it is up to the user to interpret the results and identify any accessibility issues.
For more information and instructions on installing the bookmarklets, please refer to JavaScript Bookmarklets for Accessibility Testing.