The powerful accessibility testing tools

Web accessibility tools

The powerful tools as Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust - are the substantial Accessibility basic elements that need fully be applied in order website be confident and helpful for people with disabilities. As a matter of fact, each heading, lists, tables, input fields, and content structures have to be marked-up properly, in other words, every corner of your web-resource must comply with Accessibility.
The timely tracked issue could significantly decline the risks of losing users, who desire to interact with your site but for some technical reasons cannot do it. Luckily, today, we have all keys and vigorous tools specifically designed for checking of any problems by automated services.

What is website accessibility

That's not a secret, “online” life is a necessary part of daily life. We work together with different platforms, websites, CRM every day at work. We communicate through the social network at home, we use the Apps on the road. Definitely, all these web resources have to be properly adapted for people with disabilities in the order to they could use the Web equally. For each individual, who cannot hear, see or move - all the web resources must meet all the necessary needs. To achieve this fantastic approach, today exists lots of powerful tools to inspect whether your web-resource or web Apps fully comply with the Accessibility.

What benefits do you get?

1. The most important! You will avoid any Discrimination and inequality.
   Be the top website, which supports and loves all users, despite any problems.
2. Better ranking in Search engines.
   Rest assured, it’s worth to take into account another substantial aspect: SEO. In case your website is user-friendly, people could effortlessly navigate throughout your web-resource, realize its hierarchy, and find the desired pages (conveniently positioned, highlighted the necessary places, appropriately structured as well as clearly explained). Google highly evaluates such websites and as a result, it takes them at the top places as a perfect web-resource for researching the necessary data.
3. The popularity in wide markets.
   Your website can be fully successful in your sphere, but a convenient and accessible website will bring new visitors from different spheres.

Accessibility audit, how to succeed?

Believe us, today exists plenty of auxiliary tools, but we collected only proven and best services for inspecting the sites to get the precise evaluation of the separate pages.

Wave is a Chrome extension that installs very easily. Сonveniently, that you don’t have to restart or anything, and it places right in the browser toolbar.

This service tells you a lot more about what’s going on the page visually. There you can inspect the heading structure, any warnings drawn in yellow, or any present errors. The wave includes the set of rules designed to comply with the three levels of accessibility: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. Unfortunately, Wave tools are just an evaluation tool, it doesn't have an interface to correct all these things. It’s a great solution for a quick shallow audit. After pasting the site URL you will be redirected to the special page, to overview the remarks, some warnings or errors to fix them. As an advanced feature, Wave provides its visitors with the API, that allows succeeding with an automated and remote viewing of website using the WAVE processing engine.
Please visit the Wave website to find other useful Google services.

1. WAVE

   Wave is a Chrome extension that installs very easily. Сonveniently, that you don’t have to restart or anything, and it places right in the browser toolbar.
   
   This service tells you a lot more about what’s going on the page visually. There you can inspect the heading structure, any warnings drawn in yellow, or any present errors. The wave includes the set of rules designed to comply with the three levels of accessibility: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. Unfortunately, Wave tools are just an evaluation tool, it doesn't have an interface to correct all these things. It’s a great solution for a quick shallow audit. After pasting the site URL you will be redirected to the special page, to overview the remarks, some warnings or errors to fix them. As an advanced feature, Wave provides its visitors with the API, that allows succeeding with an automated and remote viewing of website using the WAVE processing engine. Please visit the Wave website to find other useful Google services.

2. SortSite

   SortSite is a website checking tool, designed for both desktop and web applicationю This service checks broken links, HTML and CSS standards, search engine optimization, and cross-browser compatibility. In contrast to the previously mentioned tool - SortSite operates the specified website and produces a report, which in turn, generates a list of the errors, warnings, and fixes, prioritized based on the applying priority.
   
   Frankly speaking, this tool can partially confuse the developers, who will be reviewing the report, generated by the SortSite, since it contains the comprehensive information about the warning and the enhancements to be applied to fix these issues, along with the indication of numbers of lines. So, the responsible team of developers have to be familiar with the site’s structure to quality apply the necessary changes. But, in general, SortSoft qualitatively operates the specified resource and produces a detailed report.

3. aXe

   Let us introduce to another testing tool that’s very similar to Wave - aXe, that also has an extension for both Chrome and Firefox. It tool is very advantageous especially for the developers, as aXe creates a separate tab on the developer's mode.
   
   The aXe tool provides the possibility to download an issue report after filling up the registration form. This report can be used by developers to proceed with the list of necessary fixes. To start working with this service you just need to click on the analyze button and a couple of seconds later it will tell you how many issues were found along with the hints, that will help you to come up with the different ways on how to resolve the issues. In the generated report you'll find the recommendation on how frequently the detected problems appear, along with the list of problematic pages and functionality, specifying a direct link to that one in the Programmer dashboard. Here you can also find filters, allowing to mark weather "not an issue" or "this is an issue" to have a clear vision and cool hanging with your report. Last, but not least. Optionally, aXe allows performing of tests and extend your working experience by using the JavaScript testing libraries.

4. PA11Y

   Everything you ever wanted to acknowledge about automated scanning. A command-line interface that loads site’s pages and distinguishes any successfully detected errors. We consider this tool to be very useful in case you need to perform a one-off test. If you not familiar, there’s a great little tool that is powered by the HTML code sniffer, accessibility crawler and it presents all the data into a nice easy to read format that, as an end-user, it’s very easy to manage and add content to get a daily automatically scan your site. So if you are in a position, where you are maintaining more than one website - this is a great tool to have in your toolbar.
   
   So Pa11y is more than just a dashboard: as a command-line interface tool has a web service you can use and it’s also something that you can integrate into your workflow process if you have continuous integration such as like Travis for example, or Jenkins. So these are just task runners that build your websites for you. Just a quick remark, in case you are a regular user, but would like to see and be more familiar with Pa11y possibilities, you could download Koa11y. Please refer to their home site to read more about its capabilities and check the report example provided.

5. tota11y

   And the cherry on a cake) the last useful tool for usefull audit is tota11y. That’s really-really cool methodology and it has a great user interface for it. So tota11y is a plug-in and it built JavaScript, that you can stick under any sites that you’re working on. JavaScript adds a little glasses on the left corner. By clicking the glasses it nicely breaks down accessibility into a few main categories: Headings, Contrast, Link text, Labels, Image alt-text, Landmarks. Tota11y review whole website and after you click on one of the options, for example like headings, and it opens up another little box - with the description of what exactly has to be done to meet nice accessibility.
   
   tota11y is available as a bookmarklet and can be applied to any desktop browser. Merely drag the button (available on this page) into your bookmarks bar and then press it to add tota11y to the current page. This plug-in will be practical for both ordinary users and developers, as it has a clear interface for understanding the issues by visualizing them on a page.

Summary

We’ve listed to you only 5 great magical tools we use in our work. Surely, they could be used by developer-focused, non-developer focused users. The automatic test will help you to catch any related issues, but please also take into account, manual testing by individuals, that interact with web-resource - is also core and significant aspects you need to pay your attention.

Accessible websites examples

1. https://www.parrapark.com.au/
2. https://www.nsw.gov.au/
3. https://www.kidzwishfoundation.org.au/
4. https://www.cramfoundation.com.au/
5. https://www.service-public.fr/
6. https://www.ssa.gov/
7. https://www.wesleymission.org.au/

Good luck with your ideas!
Your Golems team.