Web Accessibility Remediation Tools and Checklist

Web Accessibility Remediation Tools and Checklist on Udemy

There are many tools you can use to help you find issues on your site. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines generally describe the things we should do to make our sites accessible. We should always meet the single A and double A requirements and should pass the triple A items where possible. The guidelines can be somewhat hard to navigate, but they do a decent job of describing what the requirement is, why it is important, and how you can meet it.

We've also created a checklist site that you can use to review your site. This takes the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and somewhat categorizes them by the type of content or parts of your site where they would be relevant, somewhat similar to how this class has been structured. We can see here that we have sections about text, images, audio and video, color, forms, interactive elements, user input methods, as well as layout and structure for your site.

Texas Tech uses a program called Silktide to scan all TTU websites for accessibility issues as well as things like misspelled words, broken links, or grammar issues. Silktide is currently scanning all sites updated through OmniCMS. It cannot currently scan anything behind eRaider, but that is one of our goals that we may have even achieved by the time you watch this video. Silktide does provide a browser extension in Chrome that you can use to scan any website. There is also a tool called ANDI, that's a browser plugin produced by the federal government that can help test any page for accessibility issues.

It's always a good idea to test your page with a screen reader. NVDA is a popular and freely available tool. Currently you can get the JAWS screen reader as part of the Fusion software package through eRaider. All computers and phones should also have a screen reading software tool built into them as part of their accessibility tools. Just like you should test your website on multiple browsers and multiple screen sizes, testing against multiple screen readers can help ensure compatibility for most users. In using a screen reader, typically pressing the "Down" arrow will read off the next item, pressing "Tab" will move to the next link or interactive item, and pressing "Enter" will interact with whatever is currently selected.

As always, we have short courses available to teach you web accessibility and other topics. If you ever have any questions about web accessibility or something with your site, you can reach out to itteamweb@ttu.edu. Thanks.