Thread by @LareneLg

Day 3 of 5! Tomorrow, there will be #GAAD events around the globe.

In Australia, tune-in to @a11ybytes Thu 21 May, 4pm AEST; 12 talks, 10 minutes each, all about #inclusion and #accessibility - this event changed my life.

Today, we're about accessibility checking tools 🔍 ->

So, we've talked about keyboard, and colour and contrast.

Other common #a11y mistakes:
❌ images without alt-text
❌ unlabelled <input>s
❌ icon-only links and buttons, with no labels
❌ and more...

Can all be found in one go with an accessibility analyser

Accessibility checkers are code analysers - they scan a web page's source code, and give back a report of all potential #a11y problems.

This report resembles something like what you would see out of a professional accessibility audit, with one big caveat 👉

Automated checkers can only catch ~30% of accessibility problems on a page (compared to a human checking manually) according to this brilliant report and comparison on accessibility tools:

alphagov.github.io/accessibility-…

So, no detectable problems does not mean accessible! 🙅🏻‍♀️

Automated accessibility checkers are generally built to @w3c WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standards - these are the web standards for #a11y, a checklist of sorts.

In Australia, all public sector digital products must comply with WCAG 2 Level AA standards.

While, a website that complies with WCAG 2 standards isn't guaranteed to be accessible (emphasis on "G" for "Guidelines"). It is important for designers and developers to be familiar with them.

Take a moment to read this condensed version by @webaim

webaim.org/standards/wcag…

Finally! Onto the good stuff. Here are the three accessibility analysers I often use (in Chrome):

Google's Lighthouse developers.google.com/web/tools/ligh…

@dequesystems' axe
deque.com/axe/

Microsoft's Accessibility Insights (for checking keyboard tab order)
accessibilityinsights.io/docs/en/web/ov…

I generally run accessibility analysers while I'm developing new functionality in an app; if I'm debugging accessibility problems; and before I open a pull request on something I've built.

This is a great way of catching problems early, as it will cost a lot more to fix later 💸

"Automated #a11y checker?! Then, we can use it for test-driven development and automated testing in our build pipeline!" I hear my developer friends say! 😍

The answer is, yes! But I highly recommend experimenting manually, until you know what tests you need.

Happy #a11y week!

P.S. Don't forget to check out @a11ybytes Thu, 21 May, 4pm AEST - just look at this amazing lineup of speakers! It's all free and will be live-streamed on YouTube.

Details here: a11ybytes.org/a11y-bytes-202…

GIF alt-text: browsing through the speaker list at a11ybytes.org/a11y-bytes-spe…