Browser toolbars and extensions
These bring together a wide range of specific tools in one place, including tools for highlighting headings, lists and table headers, focus order, and alternative text for images. They provide tools that are of use both to content authors and to developers.
- Web Accessibility Toolbar, by The Paciello Group. A collection of tools for checking a range of accessibility issues. Available for Internet Explorer.
- Accessibility Developer Tools by Google Accessibility (Chrome Extension): Adds an Accessibility audit, and an Accessibility sidebar pane in the Elements tab, to your Chrome Developer Tools
- The Wave toolbar by WebAIM. Available for Chrome.
- Web Developer Toolbar, by Chris Pederick. Includes some tools useful for accessibility checking. Available for Chrome, Firefox and Opera.
- Diagnostic.css, by Karl Groves. This is not a browser toolbar as such, but a CSS file that, when applied, will highlight specific potential accessibility issues on a page.
Automated tools for large-scale accessibility checking
There are many automated accessibility checking tools available, and the most useful are those that can be configured and integrated into existing development and testing processes, to rapidly and reliably check for specific issues in code. Be aware that automated tools can only ever check for issues that can be confidently identified as actual accessibility issues, or flag potential issues that require manual checking.
- SortSite Desktop: Application (for Windows and OS X) for checking web sites for accessibility issues.
- Tenon: provides an API that allows developers to integrate a wide range of reliable accessibility tests into their development workflow.
- AChecker by Inclusive Design Research Centre. Allows users to create their own guidelines, and author their own accessibility checks.
- Opquast Reporting (in French). Website quality and accessibility assessment tool. It includes features to evaluate manually and automatically, to export audit reports in various format, to create tasks from bugs found during the evaluation.
- Tanaguru. An open source (AGPL license) website assessment tool, with a focus on accessibility.