Introduction to Accessibility Testing Tools
The accessibility testing tools are defined as software testing tool that is used to perform the application testing that is used by the specialized person having problems like color blindness, hearing issue, old age people, and disadvantaged groups. Accessibility testing is a type of usability testing. The main purpose of the accessibility testing tool is to make applications that can be used by disabled people. The developers that develop the website need to take care of the accessibility guidelines that can be used to make the website design simple and easy to use for the disabled person. In the market, there are a number of accessibility test tool are available that is used for different purposes and mainly used for checking the accessibility of the website. The accessibility tools include Wave, TAW, Cynthia Says, OCAWA, MAGENTA, and many more. All these tools follow the guidelines of WCAG 1.0 and other standards so that common rules and guidelines can be followed during the time of website development. The design issues, content issues, and accessibility issues are highlighted by these accessibility testing tools.
How does Accessibility Testing Tools Work
Making the website more user-friendly and acceptable by the specialized people and the main component is that website should be accessible easily. For this purpose, there is a list of tools that can be used for checking website accessibility. In the next section, the list of tools is given here:
1. Wave
The Wave (web accessibility evaluation tool) owned by WEBAIM. The wave tool is used to validate web pages so that different perspective of accessibility can be checked by this tool. By selecting this tool, we can used it for checking intranet, dynamically generated, password-protected, and sensitive web pages. The webpage components can be identified by this tool. The third-party can be accessed online by wave tool and an alternative view for the web page can also be accessed from this tool. The major feature of the wave tool is the security measure provided by the tool.
2. TAW
The TAW is another type of tool that is used to check the web accessibility. The checking criteria for the websites are guidelines from W3C web accessibility. The tool comes in the online tools and also available as a desktop application that can be installed on the user system. The TAW tool is also available as a Firefox plug-in that can be added in the browser itself. The website annotated version can be displayed in this tool.
3. Accessibility valet
The web pages are check in this tool against WCAG compliance. The URL of the website can be checked using the accessibility valet in the free version of the tool. The premium version of the tool provides the functionality to test an unlimited URL using this tool.
4. Web accessibility checker
The University of Stanford has developed the web accessibility checker tool that is widely used to analyze single web pages that they are accessible or not. The problems reported during accessibility of the website can be listed in web accessibility checker and the evaluation can be done for each detected problem. There is a list of guidelines for checking the website that users can use. These guidelines are Section 508, WCAG 1.0, WCAG 2.0, or Stanca act.
5. OCAWA
The OCAWA tool is developed by Orange and Urbilog. The OCAWA tool work under WCAG 1.0, RGAA and law of France’s Accessibility. For using this tool users upload the website URL or can directly upload the HTML file. The tool processes the input submit in the report and then generate the complete report that includes the information of accessibility information of URL and HTML file. And if there are any violations it can be included in the report itself.
6. MAGENTA
It is another type of web accessibility tool that is created in the HIIS laboratory. This tool is majorly used by a visually impaired individual and also has a problem of color blindness. The guidelines used for checking the website accessibility is the Stanca act and WCAG 1.0 rules and guidelines.
7. FAE
The Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE) is used for evaluating the web page that uses the ITAA accessibility standards. The standards used for checking the website accessibility is Section 508 and WCAG 1.0. When the evaluation phase is complete there are a total of five categories in it that includes Text Equivalents, Orientation and Navigation, Scripting, HTML Standards, and Styling. After the evaluation, the tools give the alerts in the form of warning and fail. By this, we can do root cause analysis for the problem.
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8. EvalAccess
The University of Basque based in Spain developed this EvalAccess tool. The complete website can be easily evaluated on the basis of the WCAG 1.0 compliance. The report is generated in a very easy format so that users can understand the errors present on the website. Every error that is detected is a list in the report. Most of the developers use this tool to make their website interactive and easy to access for the user.
9. Cynthia Says
This type of accessibility tool is used to check the web content present on the website. The errors can be identified present in the content that follows the standards of Section 508 and also uses WCAG compliance. There are various applications of this tool as it can help in conducting the online test, for educational purposes and also helps in validating the web page. The website design errors can be also identified using the Cynthia Says tool.
Conclusion
In the field of software engineering, the main use of the accessibility testing tool helps to make the application that can be used by disabled people. The major testing criteria is the accessibility guidelines that are defined in several standards. If any developer is not able to follow these specified accessibility guidelines then there is a need to develop two versions of the website. One version of the website needs to be used by regular users and one version of the website can be used by the disabled person.
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