Testing pages with automated tools

There are a lot of automated tools out there. Many of them achieve the same results, but their user experience varies.

According to Deque in a blog post from 2021, their automated testing tool can identify 57% of digital accessibility issues. If true, that is quite a lot. Though manual testing is still needed. The common belief is that automated tools can find about 20-30 percent.

Some of my favorite tools

• Siteimprove is available both as a whole service to crawl your entire site and as a browser plugin
• Chrome and Edge have Lighthouse built-in
• Firefox also has some accessibility tools by default
• Deque's axe
• HTML_Codesniffer bookmarklet

Pick one automated tool and take a look at this site to see what kind of errors the automated tool will find. It will find most of the mistakes added to this site.

Code validity

Remember to also check your code with a markup validator, like The W3C Markup Validation Service. Valid and semantically correct HTML is a huge part of accessible web development. You can avoid several problems just by using the correct elements and the default functionalities for them.