Collection of free and user-friendly website accessibility checking tools
The modern web is all about website accessibility. Sites are becoming increasingly friendly to users with impairments. This is achieved by using alternate image descriptions, readable fonts, informative links texts, and so on. Developers and designers strive to make websites accessible, and content editors add their contribution by creating accessible content.
There are many useful website accessibility checking tools. We want to share with you a few free and user-friendly ones that can give you a good start in checking how accessible your website is. For a full accessibility check and optimization, you can always rely on our web development agency.
What makes website accessibility vital?
Before we move on to website accessibility checking tools, let’s see what makes the question so burning. Our colleagues from Drudesk website support have gone into details as to why website accessibility is vital for your business.
To sum up, here are a few most important reasons:
- Your brand’s reputation;
- Insurance against lawsuits
- Audience increase
- Conversion growth
- Better positions in search results
- Readiness for the technologies of the future (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, etc.)
- Overall better quality of your website
Free and easy-to-use website accessibility checking tools
1. Accessibility Checker
The Accessibility Checker free tool is meant to check the accessibility of content created in CKEditor and immediately resolve the issues found. The tool has been created by the CKEditor team — the creators of the famous WYSIWYG HTML editor used on millions of websites.
2. Wave
The WAVE, aka Website Accessibility Evaluation Tool, created by WebAIM, is a family of accessibility checking tools including browser extensions. The main tool allows you to simply submit your URL and get a useful summary. It uses a handy visualization with colors for the accessibility errors, features, alerts, and so on.
3. AChecker
The AChecker is a website accessibility checking tool created by the Inclusive Design Research Centre of Toronto University. You can submit a URL, upload an HTML file, or paste in your HTML markup directly. It is also possible to select which accessibility guidelines should be used to test your pages.
4. Functional Accessibility Evaluator
The Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE) checks your entire website or particular web pages against the WCAG. You can choose different rulesets — the more modern HTML5 and ARIA Techniques or the older HTML4 Techniques. The tool evaluates pages by web crawling, creates detailed summary reports, and saves them in your archived report lists.
5. A11Y Color Contrast Accessibility Validator
The A11Y Color Contrast Accessibility Validator by A11Y Company analyses the color contrast according to the WCAG 2.1 Guidelines. This is vital for visually impaired users.
To get the color contrast accessibility result, you can submit either a web page URL or a chosen color pair. When showing the detailed color contrast issues, the tool also provides recommendations on fixing them.
Let’s make your website accessible!
These have been just a few website accessibility checking tools for a good start. Our team of web developers, web designers, QA, and SEO specialists is ready to make your website accessible at the professional level. Contact us!