Just stumbled across a great listing of tools for evaluating and testing website accessibility over at Six Revisions. Some of the tools I’ve used before, but many I haven’t.
For example, aDesigner from IBM looks like a winner for sure. It simulates the experience of a blind or visually impaired person using your site and provides a report listing potential problems. Apparently it’s been around for a while too. Where have I been?
Why am I geeking out about website accessibility tools? Well, us government types are bound by law or by policy to make our web offerings as accessible as possible, so that all our citizens can get at the content on our sites, regardless of their level of vision or hearing or whatnot.
Which is great. & even more importantly, it’s just a good practice. Accessible web sites also are well coded websites, and this provides all kinds of benefits for everyone — such as better search indexing and improved user experience. Not to mention accessible sites render better on my Blackberry!
But it’s often painstaking work to test and evaluate accessibility, so any kind of tool that can make life a little easier gets me excited. Props to Six Revisions for putting this list together!
What's a spaghetti test?
