Tools for accessibility testing

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Written by Lenny Cartier

First we must remember the existence of guidelines. Thus, here is two guides to good practice which it seems to me essential to read when you care about the accessibility of the content of your websites :

a11y

  • The RGAA 2.2, "Référentiel Général d'Accessibilité pour les Administrations".

    The one I recommend to my users to whom I delegate the management of content... Concerns only the French government, but is essential precisely because of this "fingerprint" of government.

     

  • The WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) W3C are also essential. The french translation was published on July 6, 2011. For english readers, see here.

 

These guides are gold mines, it's true. It's interesting, challenging, it gives the satisfaction of well done work. However, I am, like others, sometimes, not to worry but to go as fast as possible, fill my content, speed up, the client on the back. Once it is done, here is some tools I use to check my work and fix what I left out in terms of accessibility.

Online tools :

  • TAW3 to check a web page against WCAG 1.0, 2.0 specs. Three levels checks (A, AA, or AAA) are available. The page is displayed with some icons on it to show where and what are the failures. Usually slow.
  • Wave, is the one I prefer for its speed : the page is parsed and displayed quicker. Icons are presents too. For example Useene.net homepage returns 6 (small) mistakes. Check here.

With these two tools you are able to check a large amount of defects.

Firefox extensions :

- note : checking webpages with differents browser is something usual, I mean, mandatory :-) -

  • Fangs : renders a web page as text only as a screen reader would do.
  • The Wave toolbar (read before)

Tools :

  • Print