Tools for assessing accessibility

I ran across an excellent blog post from Angela Colter on the tools she uses to conduct accessibility reviews for her clients’ projects. This is a very practical post full of excellent resources.

She notes:

The purpose of the review is to identify barriers on the page that would prevent someone who has a disability–or who is using an assistive technology–from using or understanding the content on the web page.

Because the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) are pretty extensive, and because there’s no tool that will automatically identify all the accessibility barriers in a web page, I use a variety of tools to help me figure out where the barriers are and what’s causing them.

The tools Angela references are all useful for assessing accessibility for technical documents, as well (though as she points out, these tools are poor substitute for testing your documents with users with disabilities).

Read more on AngelaColter.com