Happy New Year! Today, I wanted to share out a little more on digital accessibility and in particular using commonly available tools test websites for accessibility. Digital accessibility is a hot topic in the world today with many recent high profile cases making it all the way to the United States Supreme. Guys, I am super excited to introduce a tool from WAVE; it is their web accessibility checking tool.
WAVE was developed and has been made available as a free assessment tool by WebAim at Utah State University. This tool was launched back in 2001, the WAVE website notes that it has been used to evaluate the accessibility of millions of web pages. WAVE is a pragmatic tool that can allow web developers, content managers and interested parties to determine the accessibility for a single webpage (at a time).
WAVE allows the user to easily detect a range of accessibility challenges. Automated accessibility testing is able to detect approximately 30-33% of all accessibility errors in any given webpage. The industry standard best practice is to utilize automated testing in combination with getting your ‘hands dirty’ and manually test a webpage for accessibility to ensure accessibility. To learn more about using WAVE as an accessibility evaluation tool, I would recommend you attend one of our upcoming web accessibility webinars in 2020!
Thanks for reading,
Andrew
