Website Evaluation Tools

Automated accessibility testing tools are used to check a webpage or website and quickly identify a number of errors.

Each tool has strengths and weaknesses, and is likely to deliver different results for the same page or site. Automated tools, by their very nature, interpret the underlying guidelines literally, and cannot check for many content and HTML coding issues. Therefore, it is best to consider the results provided by an automated tool in conjunction with additional manual checks, including trying to navigate using only the keyboard.

Browser extensions and app plugins

The browser extensions below are all free and allow you to securely check webpages. Adding a browser extension to either Firefox or Chrome allows you to test your webpage with the click of a button.

• Axe (for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge) by Deque
• axe for Designers: A Free Accessibility Plugin for Figma
• Lighthouse (can run in Chrome DevTools, from the command line, or as a Node module; also available as a Firefox extension)
• Siteimprove Accessibility Checker (for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera)
• WAVE (for Chrome, Firefox, or Edge) by WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind), a nonprofit organization based at Utah State University

Code linters

A linter is a code analysis tool used to automatically flag programming errors, bugs, stylistic errors, and other coding defects during development. Free accessibility linters are available for a wide variety of code editors and programming languages. Similar to the browser extensions, these accessibility linters help catch WCAG violations that can be found via automation. Manual accessibility audits are still required once the code is deployed.