Accessibility Checkers and Tools:
The following resource listings
are arranged alphabetically.
- A-Prompt interactive authoring tool
for accessible documents (http://aprompt.ca/)
A-Prompt (Accessibility Prompt) is a software tool designed to help Web authors improve the usability of Web pages created in HTML format. A-Prompt can evaluate and make repair on an HTML Web page to help eliminate barriers to accessibility by people with disabilities. A-Prompt will no longer be upgraded after 2007, with the new Checker tool now available. http://checker.atrc.utoronto.ca. Checker is open source and can use the WCAG 2.0 guidelines, as well as WCAG 1.0 and 508. The Evaluation And Repair Language (EARL) standard
- Watchfire - WEBXACT -Web page accessibility checker
(http://webxact.watchfire.com)
WebXACT is a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues. Watchfire offers the full Watchfire® Bobby™ 5.0 - a web accessibility desktop testing tool designed to help expose barriers to accessibility and encourage compliance with existing accessibility guidelines, including Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act and the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The full product is apx $300.
- CSS Analyser (http://juicystudio.com/services/csstest.php)
Color contrast evaluation and validation for your CSS against the W3C's validation service, and a test to ensure that relevant sizes are specified in relative units of measurement all available at this useful site.
- Cynthia Says Accessibility Checker (http://www.cynthiasays.com/)
The HiSoftware Cynthia Says is a web content accessibility validation solution, it is designed to identify errors in your content related to Section 508 standards and/or the WCAG guidelines. Unlike HiSoftware's Desktop Software, AccVerify, this online test only validates one page at a time. HiSoftware often offers educational licensing deals, although a single license for AccVerify is about $500. CynthiaSays is free.
- Firefox Browser (http://www.mozilla.com/), Firefox Extensions - the Web Development tools (https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/showlist.php?application=firefox&category=Developer%20Tools).
The standards compliant web browser from Mozilla offers a wide range of extensions that can add some very powerful web checking tools. Web Developer is especially powerful. iCITA Accessibility Extension adds two additional categories to the main menu Accessibility and Navigation - the navigation adds navigating by headers. See "Test Your Favorite Webpage with The Firefox Browser and WAVE" for more information.
-
Macromedia Dreamweaver
Check Page for Accessibiltiy Extension (http://www.macromedia.com/exchange/dreamweaver/)
Accessibility add-ons for Dreamweaver 4, and MX.
- Site Valet
(http://valet.webthing.com/)
Site Valet offers validation, accessibility and link checking for Web and Intranet sites. An online toolkit is complemented by a site maintenance program, both of which are available to the public at the website.
-
TIDY
(http://tidy.sourceforge.net/)
Dave Raggett's HTML
TIDY, a free downloadable utility, has been adopted by Source Forge, and is now available in many formats, all offering simple ways to fix HTML
mistakes automatically and tidy up sloppy editing into nicely layed out
markup. Available with or without graphic user interfaces, and also available as a Firefox extension, TIDY continues to be a reliable workhorse, and is free. Infohound has an online version (http://infohound.net/tidy/).
- Vischeck (http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/)
Vischeck is a way of showing you what things look like to someone who is color blind. You can try Vischeck online- either run Vischeck on your own image files or run Vischeck on a web page. You can also download programs to let you run it on your own computer.
- WAVE (http://wave.webaim.org/)
The Wave accessibility checker makes use of graphic symbols to help alert you to accessiblity errors in your webpage. In general, the Wave will not tell you if the page is accessible. It's impossible
for any tool to perform a completely automatic check. For example, a tool
can check if ALT text is present, but it cannot tell if the text is meaningful
or useful. You must exercise judgment to tell if the page is accessible. The
Wave gives you information you need to help make that judgment. One especially nice
feature is that it analyzes the reading order of a page, so you can tell in
what order your page would be read.
- Web Accessibility Toolbar for Internet Explorer (http://www.visionaustralia.org.au/info.aspx?page=614)
The Web Accessibility Toolbar is provided by the Accessible Information Solutions (AIS) team of Vision Auatralia. Please read the Terms of Use before downloading and installing the Web Accessibility Toolbar. The Web Accessibility Toolbar has been developed to aid manual examination of web pages for a variety of aspects of accessibility.
- W3C
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) validator (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/)
The W3C CSS
Validator version
2.0 This is a CSS validator for Cascading Style Sheets, level 2. You can download
it, or run it from this page. The main
W3C CSS page
has excellant resources for learning and using CSS.
- W3C HTML
validator (http://validator.w3.org/)
The W3C
HTML Validation Service checks HTML
documents for conformance to W3C
HTML and
XHTML HTML
standards. Enter the URL
of your page, or upload pages from your computer. Use the checkbox for Outline to check the structural organization of your content.
- W3C WAI Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools: Overview
Learn all
about the variety of tools available and what they are capable of doing for you.
