Many of you might be aware that as of the 1st February this year, Bobby and WebXact are no longer publicly available online. Bobby and WebXact were great tools for giving you a quick overview of the accessibility of a single web page free of charge. While there is only so much automated testing tools can do, they never the less have their place in the arsenal of anyone testing websites.
After the news, we had a couple of emails come our way from people asking if we knew of any alternatives to Bobby and WebXact and the answer is…we do! There is a great resource available on the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) site which is a complete list of web accessibility evaluation tools. This would be a good place to start for anyone looking to find a new tool to use.
These are some of the favourites used by our team. Interestingly, the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC) tool includes support for checking against the draft WCAG 2.0 guidelines.
For those wishing to do some more manual checks with a little assistance, there are some great accessibility toolbars and plug-ins available for Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox (FF).
- Web Accessibility Toolbar for IE
- Chris Pederick’s Web Developer Toolbar for FF
- Jon Gunderson’s Firefox Accessibility Extension
Finally, some links to the well known Markup Validation Services provided by the W3C.
We hope these help!
Patrick Portejoie | 29/02/2008 at 0:42 | Permalink
I would add to this list a tool I rediscovered recently with version 2: aDesigner (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/adesigner).
This tool can be used to check HTML accessibility, to look at some usability issues beside compliance through simulations modes, and also allows developers of Flash/Flex content to enhance accessibility of their interfaces through accessibility information (MSAA/IA2) inspection functions.
Martin | 29/02/2008 at 22:39 | Permalink
Bobby was far superior in identifying errors than other online tools. I have started to use other online tools now but they are not as good as they seem. I now may be constrained to buy software to guarantee accessibility at the highest level.
Simon Pointer | 24/07/2008 at 15:42 | Permalink
I have been teaching accessibility and accessible web design for over 4 years now, and the webxact tool was always one of the best. However, in my experience most users have no idea how to read the results of a testing tool anyway, and need to spend more time working out what they are being told.