Tools

There are a variety of tools to assist you in performing an accessibility self-evaluation of your website or digital content.

Automated Testing Tools

While there are many automated scanners available to test websites and many products have built-in scanners (e.g., Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat), automated scanners can only detect a small percentage of accessibility issues and also produce false positives and false negatives. Some people find these tools to be helpful to double-check to make sure they didn't forget anything that the tools can detect, but manual testing is the only way to properly evaluate accessibility.

Automated testing tools can often detect the following types of issues:

  • Missing alternative text on images (but not whether alternative text is appropriate/correct!)
  • Missing captions on videos (but not whether the captions are accurate!)
  • Insufficient color contrast for solid-colored text against a solid-colored background that isn't an image of text
  • Some heading hierarchy issues on web pages
  • Tables missing headers on web pages
  • Form fields missing labels

Automated testing tools cannot reliably detect the following types of issues:

  • Anything to do with text or meaning (e.g., whether text should be a heading, whether a label is accurate, whether alternative text is appropriate, whether video captions are correct, whether instructions inappropriately reference purely sensory characteristics)
  • Color contrast of text on a picture or non-solid background, text in a video, or text inside an image
  • Images of text
  • Correct heading structure
  • Whether text can be resized without breaking things
  • Whether content can be accessed with a keyboard alone
  • ...and most other accessibility violations

Some options:

  • For websites, the university has a license for DubBot. Email the Digital Accessibility Architect for access or more information.
  • For Canvas content, the university has PopeTech. You can learn more about it from Teaching Support and Innovation's PopeTech Accessibility Guide.
  • Many people use the free WAVE web accessibility tool.
  • Microsoft Office products, like Word and PowerPoint, have an automated checker in the "Review" tab. In Adobe Acrobat, you can find an automated checker in the "Accessibility" section in the "Tools" tab.

Color Contrast Tools

While automated testing tools can identify many some color contrast issues, they don't work in all scenarios (particularly if you are using pictures as a background). In addition to allowing you to test color contrast and providing immediate feedback on whether a color combination meets our standard (WCAG 2.1 AA), both of the tools below include sliders to let you quickly adjust the colors to find a combination that works.

  • Colour Contrast Analyzer from the Paciello Group is a free program for Windows and Mac that includes an eyedropper tool that allows testing what you're actually seeing on your screen, instead of just relying on color codes.
  • The WebAIM Color Contrast Checker is a simple web page that allows you to enter color codes (hex values).

If you're using UO brand colors, we've already done the testing for you, and you can use our UO Color Contrast page to determine what combinations work.

Screen Readers

Screen readers are a type of assistive technology that provide an audio version of visual content, reading out text, describing images, and allowing the user to interact with a computer without relying on looking at the screen. Screen readers are widely used by people who are blind or who have low vision, as well as some people who have reading, language, or learning disabilities.

There is no substitute for testing with assistive technologies - no matter how well we expect something to work with assistive technologies, there's no way to confirm it unless we actually test it with those technologies. There is a learning curve to screen reader usage, so we don't expect everyone to test with them.

Screen Magnifiers

Some people with low vision use screen magnifiers, software that acts like a magnifying glass, enlarging the content wherever the cursor is pointing, up to 20x size. Some screen magnification software also reads out the content that has visual focus.

You can also zoom in on many computer programs without special software, but only to a lower level and without advanced options. In many Windows programs, for example, you can hold the Control key and hit "+" and "-" or hold Control and scroll the mouse wheel. Current accessibility standards require that should be able to zoom the content up to 200% without any loss of functionality. Many websites switch to a mobile layout at this level of zoom, which is acceptable as long as no content is totally removed.