Creating accessible content takes the right knowledge and the right tools. This section includes printable guides and recommended accessibility tools to help you put best practices into action. Whether you’re learning the basics or building on what you already know, these resources help you continue improving how you create and maintain accessible content.
Researching Accessibility Issues and Questions
Ask AIMee: An accessible accessibility-focused AI chatbot
(WebAIM)
AIMee is an easy-to-use chatbot that can answer your digital accessibility questions, provide recommendations for fixing issues, draft accessibility-related policies and checklists, and more!
Website and Web Page Accessibility Scanning
WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool)
WAVE is available for Chrome and Firefox as a browser extension. Maintained by WebAIM, it allows you to scan a page and see if there are accessibility findings that you need to take a look at.
PopeTech Accessibility Scanner
PopeTech’s accessibility scanner, which is powered by the WAVE testing tool listed above, is free for 25 pages. This may be an option for smaller websites or to test templated pages. It is the scanner currently used by Luminary Content.
Website Inventory/Audit Tools
Website Page Counter by SEOtalos
SEOtalos provides this free website page counter, which may be helpful for performing content audits and inventories. You can enter your URL and it returns a downloadable CSV of all the pages on a website. If you decide to use this or another inventory tool, it is recommended that you still manually go through your site to make sure the tool didn’t miss any pages.
Color Contrast Checkers
To learn how to use Colorzilla and the WebAIM Contrast Check or Link Checker together, you can check out Pope Tech’s article, Color Contrast Accessibility Tools with Examples. Pope Tech also has a Fix Contrast Issues with WebAIM Contrast Checkers and Colorzilla video (approx. 3 minutes) that complements the article.
Colorzilla
If you want to use a tool such as the WebAIM Contrast Checker to check color contrast, but don’t know the color values, you can use the Colorzilla browser extension. You can use it’s eyedropper tool to sample colors on your page to find their hex codes. It’s available for Chrome and Firefox.
WebAIM Contrast Checker
This tool helps with checking the contrast between background and foreground colors. It has an eyedropper tool to sample colors, and allows you to adjust the colors to help choose colors that have sufficient contrast.
WebAIM Link Contrast Checker
It’s recommended that links be underlined to ensure they stand out from other text as being clickable. If you choose not to use underlines and only use color as a link indicator, it needs to have sufficient contrast with surrounding text and this link checker can be used to check the contrast.
Writing Tools
Hemingway Editor
This tool can help you simplify your writing and make your content easier to read and understand. It will show you the readability level of your content, which sentence are hard or very hard to read, and ways that you can simplify your text.
Screen Readers
Getting Started with NVDA Screen Reader for Windows (approx. 9 min. video)
Pope Tech
This video provides step by step instructions about how to set up the NVDA screen reader on your computer. It also includes the most basic NVDA keyboard commands. After watching this video, I recommend you watch the How to Navigate a Webpage with NVDA Shortcuts for Beginners video (linked below) to learn how to navigate and read with the screen reader.
How to Navigate a Webpage with NVDA Shortcuts for Beginners (approx. 7 min. video)
Pope Tech
This video will show you how to use the different NVDA keyboard commands to navigate and read content on a webpage. If you haven’t watched the “Getting Started with NVDA Screen Reader for Windows” video (linked above) and set up NVDA on your computer, do that before watching this video.
NVDA Keyboard Shortcuts
(Deque)
If you want to step up your keyboard testing, this is a great reference for you to learn the additional ways that keyboard users can use your website.
Using NVDA to Evaluate Web Accessibility
(WebAIM)
NVDA is a free screen reader for Windows computers. This article may help new or novice NVDA users learn how to test web content.
Testing a PDF’s Accessibility with NVDA Basics (approx. 4 min. video)
Pope Tech
It’s recommended that PDF documents be tested using a screen reader. This video shows you how a screen reader reads a PDF and how you can test your documents using NVDA.
Using VoiceOver to Evaluate Web Accessibility
(WebAIM)
VoiceOver is the free screen reader program that is built into Apple computers, iPhones, and iPads. This article may help new VoiceOver users learn basic controls that will assist with testing web content.