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Accessibility automated testing

Any advice on accessibility and automated testing? Things like WAVE errors, screen-reader accessiblity, colour contrast, etc

I am guessing most of this needs to be manual testing but just wondering if there are any automated tools available.

Thanks

Solution

  • One of the rules of StackOverflow is to not ask for product recommendations. If your question is simply, "just wondering if there are any automated tools available", then the answer is "yes", there are automated tools.

    If you're asking for the names of products, that would be considered a recommendation and strays into subjective opinions.

    Doing a google search for automated accessibility testing will give you a lot of options. The W3C has a nice list of 160 different tools.

    Note that since a lot of WCAG can be subjective (WCAG 2.4.6 "Headings and labels describe topic or purpose" - who decides if the description is sufficient?), automated tools can't catch everything. The general number that seems to be accepted is that automated tools can find 20-30% of accessibility issues. To find all issues, manual testing has to be done.