Developer Resources
Tools
External Resources
Government Resources
References
WebCMS
Site Delivery Requirements
Quality Assurance

Tools

  1. Accessibility Checkers
  2. Link Checkers
  3. Spell Checkers
  4. Standard CSS and Table Template
  5. Mobile Device Resources
  6. Other Resources

This section provides a collection of developer tools for achieving accessibility of components of web pages and presents the developer with a description of the tool, the main components of the tool or highlighted aspects of the tool's functions, and links to where the tool can be obtained.

Accessibility Checkers

This list presents a small number of accessibility checkers that can be used to check the components of a web page or web site that are able to be assessed programatically for accessibility issues. Each of these presents the information in a different way and users may have a preference for one over the other. A large number of accessibility points are not able to be check programatically due to their subjective nature, therefore these checkers can only support the Quality Assurance process and not replace it. A large number of Department of Education and Early Childhood Development web requirements are additional to the WCAG Accessibility Guidelines and cannot be checked with these tools.

Wave  wave.webaim.org/

WAVE is a free web accessibility evaluation tool provided by WebAIM. It is used to aid humans in the web accessibility evaluation process. Rather than providing a complex technical report, WAVE shows the original web page with embedded icons and indicators that reveal the accessibility information within your page.

Cynthia says  www.cynthiasays.com/

The HiSoftware Cynthia Says portal is a web content accessibility validation solution. It is designed to identify errors in content related to Section 508 standards and/or the WCAG guidelines. This is an online test which only validates one page at a time.

Fujitsu Web Accessibility Checker  www.fujitsu.com/global/accessibility/assistance/wi/

The Web Accessibility Inspector is an installable program which examines the accessibility of a website and points out any important problem that affects mainly the elderly and visually disabled people. The item to be checked can be specified by its file, folder or URL. The "View on the screen" function shows the Web page to be checked in a separate window and indicates the parts that need modification with blinking red lines.

Hera Accessibility Checker  www.sidar.org/hera/

HERA performs a preliminary set of tests on the page and identifies any automatically detectable errors or checkpoints met, and which checkpoints need further manual verification.

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Link Checker - Firefox extension  www.kevinfreitas.net/extensions/linkchecker/

Link Checker extension in Firefox allows instant checking of the web page currently viewed in the browswer window. As links are checked link colour coding provides the linked status of the link. Link Checker can check for broken links, forwarded and forbidden links, good links and skipped links. Links that don't return standard HTTP headers, such as email links and other web protocols, are not checked by Link Checker.

Xenu's Link Sleuth™  home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Xenu's Link Sleuth™ checks a full web site for broken links. Link verification is done on "normal" links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, stylesheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continously updated list of URLs which can be sorted by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.

Flicker Test - Flickering and Photosensitive Epilepsy  tools.webaccessibile.org/test/check.aspx

This test targets WCAG 1.0 accessibility requirement 7.1 Until user agents allow users to control flickering, avoid causing the screen to flicker. [Priority 1]. Ther user can enter either a URL with images to test or the specific URL of the image itself for testing single images.

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Spell Checkers

W3C Spell Checker  www.w3.org/2002/01/spellchecker

This tool checks the spelling of a web page.

SEO Workers Web Site Spell Check Service  www.seoworkers.com/tools/spell-checker.html

This tool spell checks a whole site. The user is required to supply a valid email address to which the spelling report will be emailed later.

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Standard CSS and Table Template

Generic CSS and Template (Zip file - 46.9KB)

This zip file contains images, generic CSS files and table templates.

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Mobile Device Resources

Openwave  developer.openwave.com/omdt/client_sdk.html

Available for Windows only and is free of charge, although registration with Openwave is required.

Nokia mobile simulator  www.forum.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/d57da811-c7cf-48c8-995f-feb3bea36d11/Nokia_Mobile_Internet_Toolkit_4.1.html

The software is free, however registration is required.

ready.mobi Testing Tool  ready.mobi/launch.jsp?locale=en_EN

The ready.mobi testing tool evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices and standards. The free report provides both a score (from 1 to 5) and in-depth analysis of pages to determine how well the site performs on a mobile device.

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Other Resources

Optimize PDF Files  www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/pdf/

Where PDF files are available for download by users all efforts should be made to optimize them for web viewing and to decrease their download size while maintaining a quality presentation. This article provides tips and tools for optimizing PDFs for minimum file size while maintaining accessibility and search engine visibility.

Content Readability  juicystudio.com/services/readability.php

A number of industry standard metrics are available to give authors a degree of understanding how readable content is that they have written. Amongst these are Gunning Fog, Flesch Reading Ease, and Flesch-Kincaid indices. Reading level algorithms only provide a rough guide, as they tend to reward short sentences made up of short words. Whilst they're rough guides, they can be useful for a basic comparison between the nominal complexity of the content as indicated by these tools compared to the estimated reading level of the target audience.

This service analyses the readability of all rendered content. Unfortunately, this includes navigation items, and other short items of content that do not make up the part of the page that is intended to be the subject of the readability test. These items are likely to skew the results. The difference will be minimal in situations where the copy content is much larger than the navigation items, but documents with little content but lots of navigation items will return results that aren't correct.

WebAIM web site on Adobe Acrobat accessibility  www.webaim.org/techniques/acrobat/

This link provides a discussion on PDF accessibility and how to make PDFs more accessible.

JAWS  (www.freedomscientific.com/fs_downloads/jaws.asp)

A screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.

Home Page Reader  (whttp://ibm-home-page-reader.software.informer.com/3.0/)

A screen reader for Windows. A downloadable demo is available.

Lynx  (lynx.browser.org/)

A free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.

Links  (links.sourceforge.net/)

A free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.

Opera  (www.opera.com/)

A visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including text zooming, user stylesheets, image toggle. A free downloadable version is available. Compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and several other operating systems.

Java SE Desktop Accessibility  (java.sun.com/javase/technologies/accessibility/index.jsp)

Additional information on the Java Accessibility API, Java Accessibility Utilities, and the Java Access Bridge.

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