Accessibility Checkers: External Tools

WAVE Accessibility Browser Extension

he WAVE browser tool can be a real time-saver in checking your pages for accessibility errors. You don't have to open the page editor in order to do your check. That means if you don't see any error alerts, you can just move on to the next page. Yea!

Be aware, it can't check color contrast or captions but it's great for heading styles, tables, alt text and lists.

NOTE: With tables, the WAVE tool will let you quickly see if table headers are present but it's easiest to use the Canvas Accessibility Checker to actually remediate the table. The "little person" will walk you through the steps without having to go into the HTML code at all.

The WAVE tool has some quirks so here's a quick video tutorial on how to best use it.

WAVE tool

The Chrome WAVE extension allows you to quickly check multiple accessibility features on a single web page. It isn't a comprehensive page checking tool, but it does provide you an easy way to quickly gauge the accessibility of external web sites. The WAVE extension helps you identify important accessibility items such as heading styles, alt tags on images and color contrast issues.

After installing the extension, you can check any website. Simply click on the extension icon, and the accessibility check will run, automatically opening an accessibility report and tagging your webpage. The WAVE extension will even let you check color contrast!

Notes

The Chrome extension is the only one being actively updated, so we recommend using this rather than downloading the Firefox extension, which may be out of date.

If you run the WAVE tool on your own Canvas page, you'll see some of the default link colors used in Canvas come up as "Very Low Contrast." Unfortunately, this is a design flaw that you can't fix.