Website accessibility compliance is no longer optional. Businesses large and small are increasingly involved in accessibility lawsuits due to a lack of web accessibility. To help protect your brand from lawsuits, we’ve put together a list of the best free accessibility tools to make sure your website is fully accessible and adheres to common standards. You can use tools to test your site or individual pages for a number of common accessibility issues, or use tools to test for particular problems related to accessibility standards like WCAG 2.0, Section 508, the ADA, and more.

The 25 Best Free Accessibility Tools to Test Your Site

The Importance of Website Accessibility

Website accessibility standards consider auditory, cognitive, physical, speech, and visual needs when assessing websites. Additionally, websites must be accessible under all types of circumstances, including different users, environments, and conditions. Often, improving website accessibility also makes your website more usable in the following situations:

  • People using mobile devices
  • Users with broken arms or limited dexterity
  • People who are blind or have limited vision
  • Users on a bumpy bus or another difficult environment
  • Bright sunlight
  • Quiet rooms
  • Slow internet connection
  • Limited bandwidth

For those approaching web accessibility for the first time, it can seem a bit overwhelming. However, these free accessibility tools can help. Website accessibility testing is the step-by-step process of checking whether or not a website or mobile application is completely accessible for all users. Some accessibility problems can be detected by a program, while others will require user testing.

Programmatic Accessibility Testing Tools

Programmatic accessibility testing tools will sort through your site and detect issues as they are written into the code. These tools can detect issues like a lack of alternative text (alt text) for images, HEX or RGB color codes that do not have enough contrast between them, form fields that do not have labels, or links without descriptive text. This is a great place to start a website accessibility assessment, and can uncover a number of the most common accessibility issues.

Tools to Test for Multiple Accessibility Issues

A number of free accessibility testing tools can test individual pages of your site for multiple issues at once. Accessible Metrics can test your entire site for these issues, and provide regular updates to detect problems as you add new pages and content.

  1. Accessible Metrics: With a free account, you can test individual pages of your website for ADA and Section 508 compliance. With a subscription, you can test your entire site at regular intervals and get alerts about any accessibility issues that arise as you change your site.
  2. Cynthia Says: Educates you in the concepts behind website accessibility, identifying errors in web content related to Section 508 standards and the WCAG guidelines.
  3. WAVE: A suite of evaluation tools that help authors make their web content more accessible. WAVE can identify many accessibility and WCAG errors, and also facilitates human evaluation of web content.
  4. AChecker: Checks single HTML pages for conformance with accessibility standards to ensure the content can be accessed by everyone.
  5. Web Accessibility: A free web accessibility test that determines whether your website complies with WCAG 2.0 standards. You can test five webpages for free.

Tools to Check for Color Contrast

In order to make your website usable for those with colorblindness or poor vision, you must have a certain contrast between colors across your website. If an individual can’t distinguish the background from the foreground, the content is considered illegible and therefore not accessible.

  1. Accessible Colors: Input the HEX code, size and weight of your text color, HEX code of your background color, and the standard your website must comply with, and it alerts you to whether you are passing or failing.
  2. Colour Contrast Check: Input HEX codes for your foreground and background color for results based on contrast as well as WCAG compliance levels.
  3. A11y Color Contrast Accessibility Validator: Displays the color contrast issues of a web page or chosen color-pair per WCAG 2.1 guidelines.
  4. Accessible Brand Colors: Shows you how ADA compliant your colors are in relation to each other.
  5. Accessible Color Evaluator: Enter multiple text and background colors to assess your overall color scheme.

Tools to Check for Flashing

If there is any flashing or flickering effect included on your website, it could trigger seizures from users on your site. That is a direct violation of website accessibility standards.

  1. Photosensitive Epilepsy Analysis Tool: Helps you detect and eliminate problematic flashing.

Tools to Check for Image Alt-text

Alt-text describes images on a screen with text. For the visually impaired who need screen readers to use a website, the screen reader registers the alt-text in place of the image. Without alt-text for all non-text elements on the page, your website could be subject to an accessibility lawsuit. Proper alt-text can also help to improve your site’s search engine optimization (SEO).

  1. WAVE Chrome extension: Evaluate your website accessibility standing right from your browser, with complete privacy.
  2. Image Alt Test: Checks if images on your webpage are using alt attributes.
  3. Screaming Frog: A website crawling tool used mainly for SEO that can also find missing alt text in images.
  4. SEOptimer: Primarily an SEO tool that can also detect missing alt text for your images.

Those who are visually impaired will struggle to understand the context of links on a website if there is not accessible text paired with the link. Keep in mind that “dead links” are different from “empty links.” Dead links lead to pages that are no longer active. Empty links contain no descriptive text to show where the link goes.

  1. Dead Link Checker: Crawls through your website, identifying broken links for you to correct.
  2. Check My Links Chrome Extension: Crawls through your webpage and looks for broken links — developed primarily for web designers, developers and content editors.

Tools for Adding Video Subtitles

Video subtitles are also an important part of making your website accessible. The more accurate the subtitles, the better, but any attempt is better than none.

  1. YouTube: Can add subtitles to many videos automatically.
  2. Amara: Makes it easy to add your subtitles in multiple languages.
  3. Kapwing: By working with smaller chunks of your video, makes it easy to add captions.
  4. Closed Caption Creator: An easy user interface and shortcuts allow you to add captions in a short amount of time.

Manual Accessibility Testing Tools

Accessibility testing programs can detect many accessibility issues. However, there are limits to what a computer program can detect. Some issues can only be detected by a real person using accessible technologies, like a screenreader.

Free Screenreaders

Users who are blind or visually impaired may use screenreaders to read the words on a webpage. High-quality screenreaders like JAWS can be expensive, but there are also free options that you can use to test your site.

  1. NVDA: A free, open-source, high-quality screenreader developed by the not-for-profit organization NV Access.
  2. Mac VoiceOver: Built into Mac computers, VoiceOver can help you navigate your site purely through keystrokes and read-outs.
  3. ORCA: An open-sourced, free screenreading tool made for Linux operating systems.
  4. ChromeVox: A Chrome browser extension that is easy to install and lets you try screenreading on your site quickly.

It’s important to test your website to make sure it is fully accessible to everyone. Web accessibility testing is not a one-time to-do — it’s an ongoing process. Keep up on overall compliance to protect your website. These automated tools are a great start to making sure your site is safe from lawsuits.