¿Cómo funcionan las herramientas gratuitas de accesibilidad web?
It is possible that on some occasion you have considered adapting your website, making it more accessible. What web accessibility errors does the page have?
What needs to be improved to eliminate digital obstacles? These are two common questions that arise before starting the transformation process. The first step to building an accessible portal is to know its shortcomings to implement the necessary improvements.
Web accessibility tools allow you to evaluate the accessibility level of a page.
¿Puede ser utilizada por todos los usuarios?
The response of these programs is not decisive, but they do facilitate a general analysis.
In any case, a job of this nature should always be completed by professionals. However, how do free web accessibility tools work?
First of all, it is worth checking if they are free or paid. There are free tools that carry out studies automatically and show some errors. They can be online or require downloading software, but most offer a first observation.
Herramientas de accesibilidad web:
Wave
It is a free, complete and very visual tool. Simply type the URL of the website you want to analyze and in just a few seconds a detailed report will appear on the screen.
Shows contrast errors, the absence of alternative texts in images, empty links or recommendations to improve the structure. It even studies ARIA attributes.
It is advisable in this case to install the Wave extension for Google Chrome or Mozilla, depending on the browser you use. The process is quick, simple, intuitive and useful for having an instant, although not definitive, evaluation.
Accessibility Developer Tools
This is a very common Google Chrome extension. It is free and, although it does not take into account the W3C guidelines, it does analyze the most common web accessibility errors.
Automatically evaluates aspects such as color or contrast and validates ARIA attributes. Once the extension has been installed, you must access “Developer Tools” and click on “Auditis”.
Instantly, ADT will perform an automatic check on the browser page. Afterwards, a list will appear with the favorable points, errors and alerts. It shows what each error consists of and how many times it is repeated, as well as the HTML code that must be modified.
AX DevTools
The installation is practically the same as in ADT. The extension is added to Google Chrome and then there will be a new tab in “Developer Tools”.
By clicking on the “Analyze” button, the analysis of the website begins. The evaluation result is displayed on a split screen. On one side the errors of the examined portal are collected and on the other the description, including the importance, type and the regulations on which it is based.
AChecker
The standard version of AChecker inspects HTML code and detects web accessibility errors. It is a tool conceived from the source code, so the results report is displayed according to these lines of text. After analyzing the code, it shows accessibility errors and identifies the location.
It can be used by entering the URL of the website we want to analyze or by pasting the HTML code. It is a fairly quick evaluation and therefore does not offer exact precision, so the work of a human team is necessary.
Color Oracle
It is a free and particular application because it simulates a screen seen by a person with different variants of color blindness. Through a filter, the program reproduces how a user with color vision deficiencies would see the website. If the portal passes the test, it can be said that it is a space adapted to visitors with these characteristics.
In this case, the tool is limited to color blindness and does not include other users with other visual, hearing or motor deficiencies. However, it is a useful application to check whether or not problems perceiving colors are a barrier to navigation.
