Hello,
When I spoke at the Indi SEO conference in Ahmadabad on the topic How Web accessibility and usability can improve your search rankings and conversions, I gave a deeper thought and decided to put a killer list of tools that can help any web master to check their web pages for accessibility issues.
Web Accessibility Testing Tools
Wave – Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
Wave is a power full tool provided by Webaim.org, this online tools checks your web page for good and bad points and will provides a detailed web accessibility report.
If you are not interested to run web accessibility testing on online version of the Wave tool, you can use the Firefox plug-in and perform an accessibility check for each of the web page. This is mostly recommended as the online tool cannot perform the testing for password protected pages and dynamically generated pages.
FAE- Functional Accessibility Evaluator
FAE is also an online accessibility evaluator like wave… The Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE) analyzes web pages for markup that is consistent with the use of iCITA HTML Best Practices . This is built and managed by university of Illinois.
FAE – Functional Accessibility Evaluator Mozilla plug-in
FAE has got a Mozilla fire fox plug-in to check the accessibility of web pages that can help you test password protected and dynamically generated pages.
W3c Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools
World Wide Web consortium has a massive list of web accessibility tools. Please check when they are updated last and use with caution as some of them might be out of date.
Fangs Screen Reader Emulator for FireFox
I haven’t used this plug-in so can’t speak much about it now. Will run my own test and will provide my review soon. Here is a bit of description from the plug-in page, Fangs renders a text version of a web page similar to how a screen reader would read it. The ambition is to help developers understand how an assistive device would resent a website and thereby increase chances of finding accessibility issues early.
Color Checkers
I don’t have much experience using these tools as I am visually challenged my self and can’t comment much on the color contrast and visual design.
Color Contrast
Check my colors – Color Contrast
Color Blindness
Vischeck Color Blindness Simulator
Below links will help you find the authoring practices and more in depth knowledge on web accessibility.
Web accessibility and SEO go hand in hand
Web accessibility guidelines 2.0
How to add landmarks in your wordpress or web pages
Web Accessibility Blog by Rakesh
If all the following resources are read and implemented accordingly i can assure that you will achieve a mile stone in terms of creating a highly rich site which can bring you more leads and sales. If you come across any resources links and other things which might be interesting to share let me know in comments section and i will see to that it gets added .
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