Web Accessibility Tools
Do you need tools to check your website for accessibility, but you're working on a budget? Here's a list of free tools that you can use – Web based or downloadable.
Web Based
Accessibility Valet is a tool that allows you to check Web pages against either Section 508 or W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) accessibility compliance. One URL at a time may be checked with this online tool in free mode, or unlimited use with paid subscription.
The Cynthia Says portal is a Web content accessibility validation solution. It is designed to identify errors in your content related to Section 508 standards and/or WCAG compliance. This free tool, meant for educational purposes, is an online test which only validates one page at a time.
Vischeck is a tool for showing what things look like to someone who is color blind. You can try Vischeck online by either running Vischeck on your own uploaded image files or by running running it on a Web page by feeding it a URL. You can also download the program as a Photoshop plugin to use it on your own computer.
A tool for checking foreground and background color combinations of all DOM elements and determining if they provide sufficient contrast.
WAVE is a free Web accessibility evaluation tool provided by WebAIM. It is used to aid in the Web accessibility evaluation process. Rather than providing a complex technical report, WAVE shows the original Web page with embedded icons and indicators that reveal the accessibility information within your page.
This tool checks single HTML pages for conformance with accessibility standards to ensure the content can be accessed by everyone.
Downloadable
Dreamweaver is considered the most popular and capable WYSIWYG Web page editor on the market today. Adobe Software offers a collection of vendor and third-party supplied plugins and add-ons that give a wide range of accessibility checking options.
Colorfield Insight is a Photoshop plug-in that allows designers to predict image legibility for color deficient viewers by accurately simulating color blindness. Given that up to 10% of the male population is affected by some sort of color blindness, Web page designers should use a tool such as this to preview their pages to make sure important information is not being lost.