There are many good tools out there to test the accessibility of a
site. Here are some tools I have tested. This is in no way a complete
list of tools, and there are many more useful tools out there. My
feeling on these are that each was useful in its own way, but I like
the WebAim tool by far the best. Here is a breakdown of what I found
while testing each tool:
Firefox Web Developers Toolbar Reports
Reports are OK. I like the beta test better. It provides more and
contains things a developer is less likely to consider, including
contrast ratio and links that are too close together, and that links
that use the same href use the same link text. I checked
Middlebury.edu and it found things such as a missing h1 and much of
the usual problems you find with many poorly coded sites out there.
WebAim’s wave tool
WebAim’s wave tool displays the site and puts little icons all
over it alerting problems or potential problems. It includes missing
alt tags, invisible text, things that are too small. I really like
this because it shows exactly where the problem exists. This tool
seems like it makes it easier to locate a problem and fix it. I am
likely to use this as I could quickly identify and fix problems with
it. I also tested the middlebury.edu site with this tool.
FEA
FEA has a report that is interesting to read, but isn’t as
helpful to a developer. It will tell you what percentage of a
standard is complete. So I checked espn.com. It says it gets 66%
under Web standards. That’s great to know, but if I was going to
fix it, it doesn’t provide much information about where the site
comes up short. For this reason, I am not as likely to use this tool
on a regular basis. In terms of a big picture view it is useful to
see how close a site is to being accessible.
Cynthia Says
With this site, you can select which standards you want the site
to be judged on. Section 508 or WCAG. The report is not as user
friendly as some of the others. It finds violations and lists the
section 508 rule it is breaking. I checked a site that was
tables-based site, so it got hammered on the standards check. This
site would be most useful for someone who has to build a site to
section 508 or WCAG guidelines. It’s not something I would probably
use regularly, unless the work I was doing had to strictly meet the
standards.
TAW
TAW checks accessibility issue and you can set it to
different standards. It also breaks down its report into different
priority levels. The report is a little more user-friendly than
Cynthia Says and also seems very thorough. It seems to pinpoint where
the problems are a little better than Cynthia Says so it would be a
little more useful. I think you get a better anecdotal look from
scanning this report if you wanted to quickly see where you were at
as far as accessibility goes.
James Lambert is a Vermont newspaper
editor, more specifically the design editor at the Rutland Herald. He
is also an MSIT student at Marlboro College and enjoys developing Web sites and SEO. He blogs here from time to time about these topics.