Web Accessibility Testing Tools – updated

Here at TPG Interactive (TPGi) we have a technical web accessibility testing process which does not involve the use of automated testing tools. The technical audit results we provide to our clients are based solely on manual testing of a web site, web application, mobile or desktop application.


Typically, but not solely, we conduct technical testing in reference to the following web accessibility standards:

To aid us in our manual testing process we use a number of website accessibility tools and assistive technologies, the following is not a complete list of the tools we use, but these are the tools I currently use on a daily basis:

Web Accessibility Testing Tools

Assistive Technology

  • JAWS (Screen Reader for windows, demo version available)
  • NVDA (Free open source Screen Reader for windows)
  • VoiceOver (Built in Screen Reader, Mac desktop and iPhone/iPod)
  • ChromeVox (screen reader for Chrome and Chrome OS)
  • Talkback (screen reader for Android)
  • Zoomtext (Screen Magnifier for windows, demo version available)

More Web Accessibility Tools

I asked around the TPGi virtual office (Skype group chat) and people recommended some more notable and useful web accessibility evaluation tools:

Notes:

  1. We do not use assistive technology in our technical testing to carry out user testing, we leave that up to actual users of assistive technology, who we work with as part of our user research and usability testing services. But as technical testers we do use assistive technology to evaluate the data we gather. Assistive technology is an essential part of the process for understanding how the accessibility information provided in user interfaces is conveyed to users.
  2. The tools listed above are only the tools I use regularly, other accessibility engineers at TPGi may use other tools.
Categories: Development
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About Steve Faulkner

Steve was the Chief Accessibility Officer at TPGi before he left in October 2023. He joined TPGi in 2006 and was previously a Senior Web Accessibility Consultant at vision australia. Steve is a member of several groups, including the W3C Web Platforms Working Group and the W3C ARIA Working Group. He is an editor of several specifications at the W3C including ARIA in HTML and HTML Accessibility API Mappings 1.0. He also develops and maintains HTML5accessibility and the JAWS bug tracker/standards support.

Comments

KTrotter says:

Thanks for this list! Some gems here that I hadn’t heard about before.

As a side note, WAVE toolbar was released for Chrome this past week and has already been extremely valuable in my evaluations.

speaker1234 says:

You are missing one big group of disabled people. Folks using speech recognition. On the other hand, this could be a good thing because we don’t want the user interface as much the toolkit for building our own user interfaces that fit our workflows.

Steve Faulkner says:

Dragon speech recognition software is included in the more tools list, are there other tools you can suggest?