These circumstances may be permanent, as with colour vision deficiencies (CVD), or temporary, as with browsing on a smaller screen with a slow internet connection. In addition to visual impairments, users may be affected by hearing, cognitive, and motor limitations when browsing a website others may have a different social or cultural background that may alter their understanding of content. The following links have handy setup and usage instructions to get you started with testing.When making design changes, it is important to be mindful of the diversity of your readership and inclusive of users’ needs and circumstances. Users with limited mobility or dexterity may use use a Switch with one or more buttons to navigate webpages and devices. It's a great way to check how your website or app is shown to people who are blind. If you have a Mac, iPhone or iPad you already have it.
The Voiceover screen reader is packaged into all Apple computers and portable devices. It reads the text on the screen in a computerised voice. NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) is a free “screen reader” which enables blind and vision impaired people to use computers. Someare available for free download, or packaged with your device. People who are blind use assistive technologies called screen readers to read, navigate and use digital content. Use a screen reader to test how your content is conveyed to people. Colour analysisĬontent must contrast well against its background or it will be hard to read by people with low vision, or who have limited colour perception. Checking for sufficient colour contrast is easy with these free tools. For example they can't check if all headings have been marked up correctly, or how suitable heading or 'alt' text content is. in fact they're only useful to check about 30% of success criteria in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). They are accessible to screen reader users and work on any browser including mobile phonesĪutomated accessibility checkers can't check everything. It works on PC or Mac, standalone or built into Chrome Developer Toolsīookmarklets for Accessibility Testing use JavaScript to highlight roles, states, and properties of accessibility elements on the page. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, and more. You can run it against any web page, public or requiring authentication.
The WAVE Chrome and Firefox extensions allows you to evaluate web content for accessibility issues directly within Chrome and Firefox browsers.
Use these to get a snapshot of webpage accessibility. They're a quick easy way to check if images have text alternatives, if a page has headings and other accessibility fundamentals. They're simple, useful and beautiful accessibility checklists to help you and your teams. For example, we know that images and media need text alternatives, but who is responsible for getting and implementing them?ĭownload ABC Tips for Teams v2 poster series. Must-have resource to create and maintain accessible products in organisations.Įveryone in product teams has a role to play, from product managers, designers and developers through QA testers and content editors. Here are some free tools that we use and recommend.