By Cruz Lena
A website’s accessibility is one of the most important factors to consider when designing it. Why? A site with good accessibility can be used by people with disabilities, such as blindness or low vision. These are some of the best accessibility overlay tools for making sure you don’t forget that your site needs to be accessible.
- WAVE By Google
The WAVE tool by Google shows you the source code of your web page, gives it an overall accessibility score, and detects errors. You can use this tool to help determine issues that may be preventing some users from accessing and using your content. The first step is to drag and drop the URL of a website into the input field on WAVE. Once it runs, you can click each of the results to get details about the page’s incorrect information. One nice feature is downloading a file containing all of the issues found for later reference or sharing with others on your team.
- Ratio
The simple website accessibility checker called Ratio gives an overall percentage score of your page’s accessibility and detects errors. You can copy and paste a URL into the big box on their site to generate the results, or you can first drag and drop a file from your computer onto the page. In addition, the Ratio provides more detail about what is considered inaccessible versus other similar tools we tested.
- Mono
Most of the tools we tested are free, but if you want to pay money for an accessibility overlay tool, then Mono is definitely worth it. You can paste it into a URL or upload a file. It gives you all the same options as other tools, plus an incredibly detailed report that helps you decipher what needs work on your site’s accessibility.
- Page Valet
Page Valet is another tool that runs an overlay on your site. This service gives you a 0 to 100 percent website score based on the WAVE toolbar results. It detects errors, shows you how to fix them, and walks you through the process step by step. They have a great library of articles and tutorials for those who are new to accessibility.
- Web Accessibility Toolbar
The Web Accessibility Toolbar is an extension for the Firefox browser that allows you to check websites you visit automatically against the Google PageSpeed rules, W3C Standards, and Section 508 regulations. This is a free tool that gives you an overall score based on the results of those scans. The Web Accessibility Toolbar also detects errors and tells you exactly how to fix them.
- Tenon by Plr8Tools
Tenon is a web accessibility tool that analyzes your site’s links, images, and tables for potential issues. Its website doesn’t offer as many features as other tools in this post, but it gives you all the information you need to know about your site. Tenon is free if analyzes are done on your local machine or $22 per year for unlimited users and accessibility scans of websites by uploading a file.
- GULP By Yast
GULP is an automated accessibility testing tool that runs on your local machine, and it’s available for free. You can paste in a URL or upload a file, and GULP will scan the document for accessibility problems. It can even point out potential barriers for people with disabilities, such as low vision and mobility impairment. Unfortunately, this tool doesn’t give you much information about what to do if there is an error, but it does highlight all of the problems.
