Tools for assessing web accessibility

Kevin, a former H808 colleague, posted the following on accessibility today - very useful as next week on H807 we are investigating usability.

This post is also made automatically from my new amplify.com account - a social bookmarking tool which I'm experimenting with as part of this week's web 2.0 tool investigations.

Amplify’d from newlearning.wordpress.com

New Learning

Making sure your web content is accessible

Filed under: Uncategorized — kevhickeyuk @ 9:54 am

Here are a few tools that should help anyone  who wants to make sure their website/intranet/ online learning content, is as accessible as possible;

The VisCheck site simulates how your site will look for users with different forms of colour blindness. http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckURL.php

The Accessibility colour wheel allows you to select foreground and background colours, simulates how they would look to those with different types of colour blindness.  If you select a colour combination that is good, in terms of accessibility, you will get a ‘good’ message appear on the screen. http://gmazzocato.altervista.org/colorwheel/wheel.php

WAVE is a free web accessibility evaluation tool provided by WebAIM. It is used to aid humans in the web accessibility evaluation process. Rather than providing a complex technical report, WAVE shows the original web page with embedded icons and indicators that reveal the accessibility of that page. http://wave.webaim.org/

The Fujitsu Web Accessibility Inspector is one of a number of tools that will validate a webpage according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) guidelines.  This can produce a detailed report which identifies a number of issues.  If you are using a system such as SharePoint, then it might highlight issues that you will not be able to easily change. http://www.fujitsu.com/global/accessibility/assistance/wi/ Read more at newlearning.wordpress.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/by94f