Because it's always a pain to type long web addresses from a book into a web browser, here are handy links for every Tool mentioned in Chapter 11 of the book.
ACCESS Checklist
Aesthetics
Lighthouse
Open-source tool for auditing web pages. Available inside Google Chrome as standard, and creates shareable reports that are scored out of 100.
Guide to accessibility tree — Google Chrome
An overview of what the accessibility tree within Chrome dev tools is, and how to use it to identify and debug accessibility issues.
WebAIM contrast ratio checker
An online tool that lets you check the contrast ratio between two colours according to the various levels and success criteria within WCAG.
TGPi contrast analyser tool
A colour contrast analyser that can be installed on both Mac and Windows. This sits as a small window on your computer, and displays whether the selected colours pass the three levels of WCAG contrast checks. It also has a swatch tool that allows you to select a colour from anything on your screen.
Sim Daltonism
Sim Daltonism lets you visualise colours as they are perceived with various types of colour blindness. Use the camera on your iOS device, or use the Mac app to filter a region of the screen.
Design tools
A series of accessibility-based plugins for popular design tools. There are some tools that are available for all platforms, for those teams who use multiple tools.
Content
Headings Map
A browser extension that creates a heading tree based on the web page you're on. It will highlight in red any headings that aren't semantic so you can fix them.
Validity extension
Validity can be used to quickly validate your HTML documents from the toolbar. Clicking the icon will display all the errors for the page in the browser console.
WebVTT Validator
Tool created by the W3C to allow for quick validation of the captions / subtitles you've created. It will display errors inline, and you can edit them from within the page.
HappyScribe caption file converter
A free online tool to convert subtitle and caption files between a range of different formats for use on different platforms. It also allows you to create a transcript from a subtitle file.
Reading time calculator
Input your text into this website in order to calculate how long the average person would take to read it. It takes into account word count, length of words, and length of sentences.
Cognition
Web Developer extension
A browser extension that allows you to check the content of your web page against a range of accessibility checks quickly. Tests include disabling styles, outlining headings, and displaying the content of alt attributes on images.
WAVE evaluation tool
An extension that will automatically inject a series of icons and indicators into the page to display not only errors and warnings but also accessibility features that are currently working, like HTML tags, and ARIA attributes.
Flesch-Kincaid reading ease test
An online test to check how easy it is for someone to read your content, based on the Flesch-Kincaid reading ease test. Simply input the content and have it tested.
Hemingway editor
This editor highlights parts of your text that it deems hard to read for users, and can help you make it easier. It provides a readability grade, shows different colours to represent different issues, and even has an AI feature to suggest edits.
Dark Patterns 'Hall of shame'
A gallery of user-submitted examples of dark patterns and the companies responsible for them. This is maintained on the site of the person who coined the term 'dark patterns', Harry Brignull.
Ease of use
Screen Readers
A list of free and paid screen readers on a range of different operating systems, allowing you to test how your site can be navigated without visual interaction.
Deque University - Screen reader usage guides
Deque University published and maintain a series of excellent guides and shortcuts that you can use as a reference until you feel comfortable. They explain the best combinations of screen reader and browser for testing, cover all of the popular options, and many have been condensed to single page guides that you can print out or have open.
Assistiv Labs
Allows you to manually test a range of assistive software directly from your browser, by remotely connecting to real assistive technologies. Through this tool, you can conduct manual testing on a range of screen readers, high contrast mode, and screen magnifiers.
Sara Soueidan - Screen reader setup guide
A comprehensive guide around how to set up various screen readers on desktop and mobile devices. It covers typical navigation, good combinations of tools, and more.
ARIA Authoring Processes Guide
Learn to use the accessibility semantics defined by the Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) specification to create accessible web experiences. This guide describes how to apply accessibility semantics to common design patterns and widgets. It provides design patterns and functional examples complemented by in-depth guidance for fundamental practices.
Settings
Gov UK - Persona profiles
A series of hypothetical users, with specific devices and access needs, that testers can use to take into account the experience for those with disabilities.
Empathy Lab
Help your team understand how people with disabilities experience and use technology, by using a range of technologies that simulate various access needs. You can engage with companies to set up your own, or use another company's. Below is a list featuring examples of both.
Automated accessibility tools
axe-core
Open source, completely free, and the most popular testing engine in the world, with millions of downloads every week. axe-core is the foundation for a lot of tools, but it can be used standalone as a browser extension, and you can write your own tests with it.
AccessLint
A tool that automatically reviews code submitted to Github as a pull request and comments if it finds any issues. It also lets you know when you've fixed them.
Pa11y
Perfect for when you're developing. Pa11y can be run as a command or set up to watch files, and lets you know if what you've written is accessible or not.
Pa11y dashboard
A Pa11y dashboard can show you all of the current errors, warnings, and notices that you currently have on your website. It also shows you how those numbers have changed over time, and you can download that information at any time.
Other useful tools
The A11y Project
All-round useful website for all things accessibility - containing guides, how-to's, and an active blog covering changes in accessibility.
Gov UK - Designing for accessibility posters
A range of great starter posters highlighting simple do's and don'ts for a range of disabilities. Perfect for starting a discussion with companies about accessibility.
How to Meet WCAG (Quick Reference)
To help you decide the WCAG compliance level you will aim for, and understand what that level entails, the W3C created a handy site - the WCAG quick reference site. It includes all of the guidelines, success criteria, and techniques and failures, organised to make navigating and finding success criteria and their relevant supporting documents easier.
Writing an accessibility statement
It's important to notify your customers of your progress: what you're aiming for, that you're not where you want to be, and to reach out if they find anything impossible on your site. This is most commonly handled through publishing an accessibility statement, which you can typically find in the footer of most websites. The UK government has a nice sample statement you can adapt for your own use.
Experte - Accessibility website crawler
Experte have created a neat tool where you provide the homepage of your website, and it will crawl through all other public pages within that domain to find accessibility issues. It's not all-encompassing in the issues it checks for, but it runs through some of the most common ones and can check up to 500 pages.
Gov UK - Running research with those with disabilities
A guide written to help people planning to conduct their own research sessions with people who have disabilities. Includes advice for before, during, and after a session.
a11y project - list of professional help for accessibility
For if you feel that you need a helping hand when it comes to making your site(s) accessible. a11y project have collated some trusted accessibility consultants.