Ensuring your website is accessible and usable by all people, regardless of disability, is not just an ethical imperative – it also makes good business sense. With over 1 billion people in the world estimated to have a disability, building an accessible website expands your potential customer base while also minimizing legal risks associated with non-compliance.
This comprehensive guide explores the world of web accessibility testing. We‘ll shine a light on common barriers faced by disabled users online, provide an overview of relevant laws and guidelines, make the case for accessibility, and showcase 8 awesome tools to monitor and test the accessibility of your website.
What is Web Accessibility and Why Does it Matter?
Web accessibility refers to the inclusive practice of designing websites that work for all people, regardless of disability type or severity. This includes:
- Visual – blindness, low vision, color blindness
- Motor – inability to use a mouse, slow response time, limited fine motor control
- Auditory – deafness, difficulty hearing videos
- Cognitive – learning disabilities, distractibility, inability to remember or focus on large amounts of information
There are many reasons why web accessibility is important:
- Social justice: The web is for everyone – accessibility supports equal rights and participation in society for the 15% of people with disabilities.
- Business benefit: More accessible sites have better search engine rankings, lower development costs, and attract more diverse visitors and loyalty.
- Legal necessity: Many countries require web accessibility to comply with laws that protect disabled users.
Relevant Laws and Guidelines
While specific regulations differ globally, most aim to ensure disabled users can access and use websites with similar ease to others. Common standards include:
- ADA (US): Requires equal access to goods and services for disabled Americans under the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. Applies to all commercial sites, especially e-commerce.
- WCAG 2.1: Global standard for web accessibility published by the W3C group. Covers needs for visual, motor, hearing, and cognitive impairments. Has 3 compliance levels from A to AAA.
- Section 508 (US): Requires federal agency websites, documents, and software be accessible to disabled citizens. Based on WCAG criteria.
The Accessibility Triple Win
Beyond legal compliance, ensuring your site hits accessibility guidelines has tangible benefits:
- Attract more visitors: Over 15% of computer users have some disability requiring assistive devices. An accessible site draws more visitors.
- Enhance UX for all: More usable interfaces with flexibility in how info is presented helps disabled and non-disabled users alike.
- Unlock business potential: Accessibility features like alt text for images, transcripts for audio, compliant color contrast open your content to more ways of consuming it.
Put simply: accessible design is just good design. Let‘s look at how to test for issues so you can provide the best experience for all users.
What Makes a Site Accessible? Key Components to Test For
While testing tools automate checks, it helps to understand what core components they are assessing behind the scenes. These include:
Code Validity and Standards
- HTML, CSS, ARIA roles follow web standards for accessibility
- Sensory characteristics not relied on alone (color, shape, size, visual location)
- Custom UI controls/widgets properly tagged
Text Alternatives
- Images, audio, video have text descriptions
- Non-text content like charts visualized for blind users
- CAPTCHAs provide options beyond visual recognition
Multimedia Functionality
- Videos and live audio offer captions
- Multimedia doesn‘t auto-play audio unexpectedly
- Speech recognition tech can access all audio
- Logical heading structure to navigate pages
- Intuitive focus order for keyboard navigation
- Clearly visible notifications, labels, and instructions
Readability and Understandability
- Readable font size and color contrast
- Easy to understand language, structure and design
- Content compatibility with assistive devices like screen readers
This list just scratches the surface, but gives a sense of the breadth and depth of checks conducted by automated auditing tools.
8 Awesome Tools to Test Website Accessibility
Manually reviewing websites for the multitude of WCAG 2.1 criteria is hugely impractical and error-prone. Thankfully, specialized tools can automate the heavy lifting for you.
Here are 8 top options to test and monitor website accessibility:
1. Siteimprove
Siteimprove offers an all-in-one cloud-based solution for web governance that includes detailed accessibility audits.
Key features:
- Tests entire sites or individual pages against WCAG 2.1 AA/AAA
- Crawls and scans site to detect issues
- Identifies legacy PDF/Word/PowerPoint accessibility issues
- Rich browser extension for in-page analysis
- Custom reporting and filters to prioritize critical problems
- Monitoring and alerts when new issues arise post-launch
- Integrations with GitHub, Azure DevOps and CI/CD pipelines
- In-depth developer resources and test APIs
Pricing: Offers free trial. Paid plans from $115/month. Volume discounts available.
Pros
- Comprehensive features
- Code scanning and analysis
- Developer-friendly integrations
Cons
- Complex setup and configuration
- Steeper learning curve
- Can miss some subjective issues
2. WAVE Web Accessibility Tool
WAVE is a free and easy way to evaluate web content for accessibility issues right from your browser.
Key features:
- Test site pages directly from Chrome/Firefox extensions
- Identify errors like missing form labels and alt text
- Check contrast errors and color dependency
- Evaluate site structure, navigation, and focus order
- Enable screen reader to check page speech playback
- Customize tests for advanced options
- Export full accessibility report to PDF/CSV
Pricing: Free browser extensions and basic website report. Premium versions starting at $150/year offer advanced features.
Pros
- Simple browser-based testing
- Quick error flagging and fixes
- Easy to get started
Cons
- Only samples subset of site pages
- Limited configuration options
3. Accessibility Checker
Accessibility Checker takes the next step in presenting understandable, actionable suggestions tailored to the context and users impacted by any accessibility misses.
Key features:
- Comprehensive audits against WCAG 2.1 standards
- Clear pass/fail signals for testable criteria
- Concise, jargon-free reporting on specific issues
- Guidance on real-world impact and severity for users
- Inline assistance on resolving common test failures
- Integrates with Jira to connect dev teams
Pricing: Free version offering basic tests. Premium paid plans provide complete site scanning, test automation, and custom reporting.
Pros
- Clarifies issues in plain language
- Puts people at the center
- Quickly generates templated dev tickets
Cons
- More focused on awareness than pure compliance
- Light on technical specification details
4. Tenon Accessibility Tool
Trusted by leading enterprises and government agencies, Tenon delivers low-noise signals to zero in on legitimate code quality and accessibility misses.
Key features:
- Scans pages against 50+ accessibility standards
- Highlights AA/AAA errors with quick coding fixes
- Filters violation noise from legit development flaws
- Compare reports across devices and test environments
- Schedule recurring scans
- Command line and API access
- Integrate with GitHub, Jira and other dev tools
Pricing: Free tier offering basic tests. Paid plans from $99/month with volume pricing available.
Pros
- Cuts through false positives
- Great debugging for devs
- Flexible integration options
Cons
- Dated interface
- Detail-heavy reporting
And that‘s just 4 of the 8 awesome web accessibility testing tools out there today! Let me know in the comments if you‘d be interested in me covering the remaining options…
Now that you‘ve had a crash course in offerings available, let‘s walk through how to take one for a spin on your own site.
Putting an Automated Testing Tool Through Its Paces
While scanning capabilities differ across tools, the general workflow is similar:
1. Provide Your Website Details
Submit your website URL, choose any advanced configuration options offered (e.g. authentication) and kick off your first scan.
2. Review Scan Results
Once complete, you get a detailed report including:
- Accessibility score – Overall accessibility rating
- List of detected issues/errors – Counts and details on coding flaws, missing attributes, contrast errors etc.
- Violation severity – Flagging of minor problems vs more serious misses unlikely to pass compliance reviews
- Issue grouping – Clustering problems by issue type for easy analysis
- Contextual details – Pages, line numbers and code snippets where errors appear
3. Break Down and Prioritize Issues
Review your accessibility report and any violation groupings offered. You‘ll want to:
- Identify quick wins – easy fixes with large impact.
- Map more complex failures to site pages and templates.
- Confirm severity levels and eliminate any false positives.
- Drill down on errors without clear coding assistance to determine solutions.
Triaging your results helps build an efficient remediation roadmap.
4. Re-test Resolved Issues
As developers modify the site to address accessibility gaps, re-run scans to validate fixes and spot new problems that may get introduced accidentally.
Most paid auditing tools make this step seamless by saving testing history and comparing latest results against previous runs.
Accessibility Testing in Action
Let‘s walk through an example using the popular Wave browser extension to see what auditing looks like first-hand.
After installing, we can easily kick off an evaluation by clicking the Wave icon now available:
Running an analysis immediately pulls up the Wave panel and starts flagging detected problems – no redirects or context switches. So far so good.
Reviewing the itemized issues, we see common flags around missing form labels, low contrast text, empty links and more.
Clicking any item gets more details on severity, solutions, and elements affected. There‘s also an accessibility checklist covering best practices for structure, semantics, and behavior.
The highlighted CSS selector helps zero in on style rules that need updating to resolve the color contrast concern raised.
Let‘s toggle on the screen reader and contrast checkers for additional on-page checking:
The outlined areas let us experience first-hand the challenges low vision and blind users could face with this page in its current state.
Running through these examples gives a small taste of how automated testing tools shine light on weaknesses that could limit site accessibility and usability in the real world.
Accessibility Testing Tips and Tricks
Here are some key things to remember when evaluating website accessibility:
Retest early and often – schedule recurring scans to monitor progress as issues get fixed incrementally.
Review edge cases – weird one-off pages, journey flows and interstitials often get overlooked by automated checks.
Spot check in browsers and devices – subtle bugs affecting focus, zoom or grammars could still slip through.
Confirm with real users – no amount of synthetic testing beats getting feedback from actual disabled users.
Focus on impact – don‘t get distracted chasing technical compliance on little-viewed legacy pages.
Involve designers and writers early – many common accessibility pitfalls introduced long before code gets written.
Connect work to outcomes – link successes like more positive customer ratings back to accessibility initiatives to spotlight impact.
Pulling It All Together: A Plan for Ongoing Web Accessibility Success
Earning disability access compliance and certifications like ADA, WCAG, and Section 508 is well within reach by following a thoughtful roadmap:
- Audit comprehensively with automated scanner tools to shine a light on the current state.
- Break down holistically to uncover problem patterns across page types, templates, and workflows.
- Prioritize judiciously by weighing severity, benefit, and level of effort.
- Resolve collaboratively via pairing designers, writers and developers.
- Measure consistently with scheduled re-testing to spot new gaps quickly.
- Sustain systematically by integrating scans into release processes and CI/CD pipelines.
View web accessibility not as a compliance box to check but an ongoing ladder to climb in better serving disabled customers.
Let me know if this guide gives you new insight into available web accessibility testing tools or sparks ideas on improving your current site evaluation workflow!
