Hi Folks,
Hope you people are liking this series on accessibility testing.
Today in continuation to the series we are going to discuss how to perform accessibility testing using tools.
We are broadly going to talk about the most popular accessibility testing tools along with their features.
- cynthiasays is a web-based compliance checker that checks a given URL for accessibility. This tool provides an accessibility report once a user enters the URL of the public website. It then shows a green mark or a red mark for items based on their being accessible or not. It also gives a blue mark for errors that need manual attention. This tool lets us test individual pages on websites and provides a comprehensive report.
URL- http://www.cynthiasays.com/ - WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool) The WAVE Chrome extension enables us to check web content for its accessibility compliance. This is a safe tool as all the extensions run within the web browser and hence no information needs to be sent to the WAVE server and hence data remains secure. The extension can check intranet, password-protected, dynamically generated, or sensitive web pages. Also, because the WAVE extension evaluates the rendered version of your page, locally displayed styles and dynamically-generated content from scripts or AJAX can be evaluated.
URL- https://wave.webaim.org/extension/ - Lighthouse This open-source tool is used to improve the quality of websites in terms of accessibility. This can be run on any web page and it checks for accessibility quotient for websites as wells as checks their performance. It can be run in Chrome DevTools from the command line or as a Node module. After feeding a URL to it, Lighthouse runs a series of checks and audits and provides a report on the score of the web page’s accessibility score and provides indicators on what all needs improvement. Each of the audits has a reference doc that explains the relevance of the audit and how to fix the issues.
URL- https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse - AChecker This tool is used for evaluating the accessibility of the HTML content either entering the location of the web page or by uploading or pasting the full HTML source code from the web page. Like all other tools, AChecker creates a report of all accessibility issues for the selected guidelines.
URL- https://achecker.ca/checker/index.php - webaccessibility This tool allows us to test up to five individual pages for free. It provides us with an idea of whether our website is compliant with WCAG guidelines and Section 508. This is a paid tool that would make the assessment and solution of the accessibility and related issues on the webpage.
URL- https://www.webaccessibility.com/ - aXe This is an Accessibility checker for WCAG 2 and Section 508 accessibility. This tool finds accessibility defects on our website or web application by using the aXe Chrome extension. This is a fast and lightweight accessibility testing tool that only checks for accessibility issues that can be accurately detected via automation, and it tests for components that actually exist on the page or the application being tested.
URL- https://www.deque.com/axe/ - Tenon This tool tests the code before deployment while it is being developed and checks for all sorts of accessibility gaps. This tool tests and fixes the issues on the highest traffic pages. This tool works sync with the developers itself and adapts core system UI patterns affecting accessibility.
URL — https://tenon.io/
After talking about these tools and understanding their working here we would suggest that we might not achieve complete coverage for our product is fully compliant with accessibility guidelines. We have to try and use various tools to achieve a product that is highly useful to various people with a diverse set of needs and requirements.
We meet next with another discussion. If you guys have suggestions or some specific topic that you want us to take up please let us know.
Till then take care. Enjoy life.
Originally published at https://www.qekafe.com on October 12, 2020.
