By Scott Will
Making your website accessible to everyone is more important than ever. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it can also open your business up to a whole new market of customers. In this article, we’ll look at eight different accessibility overlay tools you can use to help make your website more accessible. We’ll also look at some of the newest trends in web accessibility, which is an area that continues to grow with each passing year.
- WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
WAVE provides an overview of issues found when testing for accessibility online. In addition, this tool gives you the ability to check multiple pages all at once so you can get an idea of where issues might lie.
- Tenon
Tenon is a service that lets you test your web apps for accessibility from within your browser, which saves time and effort when it comes to checking the quality of your website’s latest updates. All you have to do is paste in a URL, and Tenon will show you the results of testing your website.
- UX Check
UX Check is another service that works as an accessibility overlay tool on your website to help you identify any potential issues with your site’s navigability, content readability, and more. You can then fix those problems before they impact users.
- Color Contrast Analyzer
This tool is good for checking the color contrast of your website on any background, and it also has an option for using a photo as your background if you need to. This way, you can change the brightness and darkness on those images until you find just the right combination that meets accessibility guidelines.
- Web Accessibility Toolbar
The WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications) is designed to help you check for web page content that’s missing important tags. The toolbar provides quick access to individual checks, and overall scores show where your site ranks with overall accessibility. Unfortunately, although this tool is good for quickly checking your website, it doesn’t provide much to correct any problems that are found.
- Color Contrast Checker
This tool is designed to check your website’s foreground and background colors for contrasting issues that may make your site difficult to navigate by those with color blindness or other disabilities related to color perception. This is a good tool if you want to correct issues with color on your website yourself. And although this tool isn’t free, it does have a demo version, so you can test out its features before buying.
- WAVE – JAWS Scripting Enablement
This is another tool that runs directly in the browser of people using screen readers or other tools requiring scripts. Again, this is a good quick check tool, but it doesn’t provide ways to correct problems found on your website.
- JavaScript Deobfuscator
JavaScript is the language frequently used for overlays and other scripting on websites. This tool helps you identify where some of those scripts are being used to evaluate their usefulness. If you find that they’re not needed at all, this tool can help you take them out to improve your website’s accessibility.
