Testing tools

See also

Keyboard testing

This page contains a list of various tools and use cases for those tools. Your milage may vary.

Broad-spectrum Manual testing

Browsers. Whatever your organization supports. Old and new versions if possible.

After browsers, there’s these plugins and bookmarklets:

• Tota11y – an accessibility visualization toolkit by the folks at Khan Academy
• HTML 5 Outliner produces an outline of an HTML document to check for headings that are structured poorly.
• Chrome High Contrast plug-in – allows you to use Chrome in a high-contrast mode. (Note: this isn’t the same as the operating system’s high contrast mode.)
• ANDI testing tool by the US Social Security Administration. Recommended for testing Are the names used on the page unique? and may be useful for other tests as well.

Broad-spectrum Automated Testing

• Lighthouse by Google provides accessibility testing that can be run in the browser, in the console, or in Node.
  • See Google’s Lighthouse in Chrome instructions for running accessibility tests in the browser.
• Axe Linter by Deque provides automated source code accessibility checking.
• Jaws Inspect isn’t a fully automated solution for screen reader testing, but it gets us closer to automation.

Screen Readers

• NVDA (Non-Visual Desktop Access) for Windows
  • Download page – this is free software
  • NVDA User guide
  • Symbol text descriptions in NVDA
• VoiceOver for Mac (comes preinstalled on Mac and iOS systems)
• ORCA for Linux
• JAWS for Windows
  • Symbol text descriptions in JAWS

Braille Viewers

• JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver Braille Viewers – If you don’t have a Braille display, you can visualize what one looks like using these screen readers. This doesn’t replace testing with proper equipment. It’s better than having no understanding of a Braille viewer.

Zoom for Low Vision

• ZoomText – Windows software for zooming, screen color, mouse, cursor, and more.
  • Introduction to ZoomText and Screen Magnifiers video on YouTube.
• MAGic – Windows software for zooming, screen color, mouse, cursor, and more.

Depending on the version installed, these applications may have basic screen reader features as well.

Color Contrast Testers

• List of Contrast Checkers

Theming Overrides

So you’ve themed your website, but it’s not working for your customers. Sometimes they complain. Sometimes they take matters into their own hands. The following pieces of software provide users the ability to re-theme your site. They’re listed here because I’ve already had an experience where a user overrode our corporate colors due to low vision concerns then called us when we unknowingly broke their (technically unsupported) plugin.

• ZoomText offers theming overrides.

Dark reader:

• Dark Reader for Chrome
• Dark Reader for Firefox
• Dark Reader for Safari – $5 on the App Store.