Building an Accessible Website – Useful Tools
As we all know, building a good and at the same time accessible website can be an interesting but also difficult task. A website should meet several important criteria. When creating and checking our...
As we all know, building a good and at the same time accessible website can be an interesting but also difficult task. A website should meet several important criteria. A range of applications and tools created specifically for this purpose can help us when creating and checking our website. Below I describe 5 such tools with different uses.
PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is a free tool from Google, available as a website at: https://pagespeed.web.dev/
All we need to do is enter the URL of the page we want to check, and after a moment the tool will display the results. It measures loading times precisely, separately for desktop computers and mobile devices. It also points out elements whose improvement will increase the website's performance. A typical, very common problem is images, which are most often too large in size and file weight. With this tool, building a properly optimised website becomes much easier.
Colour Contrast Analyser
This is a free program that lets you check whether the correct contrast is maintained on the website for both text and non-text elements.
WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
An application that works in a web browser. It allows you to check your website quickly and easily against many WCAG 2.1 conformance criteria. These include:
- Do images have alternative text?
- Problems related to correct contrast (just as in CCA).
- Is the correct structure of the website maintained?
- The presence of ARIA-LABEL attributes.
W3C Markup Validation Service
Another tool that works in a web browser. It checks whether the page's HTML code contains errors. These errors may also concern empty tags, invalid attributes and many other notes and warnings.
NonVisual Desktop Access NVDA
NVDA is a popular and free screen reader. It is used by people with visual impairments. The program is updated regularly and is completely free. It reads out everything on the screen. This program can help us check whether our website is readable for users of programs such as NVDA.
