Around one in five college students report having a disability. These disabilities include physical disabilities, visual impairments such as low vision or color blindness, hearing disabilities, and cognitive impairments such as dyslexia. Public and private institutions are required to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, which covers Title II (state and local) and Title III (private) colleges and universities.
The ADA also requires that websites, content, and mobile applications be compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which are a globally recognized set of success criteria for digital accessibility. Testing your website for potential accessibility violations will keep your institution compliant with the WCAG, and using an accessibility checker will help you achieve your institutional accessibility goals. Let’s learn more about accessibility checkers and the benefits they can provide.
What is an accessibility checker?
An accessibility checker is a software tool that gauges your website’s compliance with accessibility standards, such as the WCAG. It looks at your website’s structure, functionality, and content to find potential accessibility violations that may keep users with disabilities from using the site properly. Most accessibility checkers use AI to read hundreds of lines of HTML code to scan for issues and generate a report that contains these issues, along with steps you can take to remediate them.
While an accessibility checker can help speed up the process of finding potential violations, you cannot depend solely on software to address your website’s accessibility issues. An accessibility checker can only check issues with the design of the website, not its functionality. It can find flaws in the code that indicate a lack of support for keyboard navigation or speech readers, but you will have to test your website manually to confirm these findings.
What can an accessibility checker help you find?
Despite these limitations, an accessibility checker is crucial in helping individuals with disabilities access and learn from your website, mobile app, or learning content. Here are some typical accessibility violations you can identify with an accessibility checker.
Incorrect color contrast
Color contrast refers to how text stands out against its background and is a primary factor for readability. Because colors are encoded in HTML as combinations of red, green, and blue (RGB), it is easy for an accessibility checker to calculate the difference in relative luminance between two colors, also known as the contrast ratio. While black text on a white background has a contrast ratio of 21:1, the WCAG recommends at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for larger text, giving you some room for institutional branding guidelines.
Missing alt text
Alternative text is a short description of the content and meaning of a visual element on a web page. It is embedded into the HTML code containing the image and is displayed on the screen when the image cannot load due to a slow network connection or other technical issues. A screen reader also reads it aloud so users with visual impairments can understand what’s being displayed. An accessibility checker can locate HTML code where alt text is supposed to be incorporated, but you will still need to confirm the accuracy of existing alt text.
Missing headings and subheadings
If a book has chapter titles, headings and subheadings perform the same function for websites. They help the reader know what they can expect to read in a specific section, add readability by breaking up long blocks of text, and help users locate relevant information. Headings and subheadings on websites require special <h1> or <h2> tags that indicate their position in the reading hierarchy. An accessibility checker will look for these tags and report if they are missing or not in the correct order (<h1> first, then <h2>, <h3>, and so on).
Accessibility checkers: Making accessibility easier to address
Accessibility checkers have made it easier to scan your website for potential barriers to users with disabilities, especially with new content being added to your website daily. While accessibility checkers can automate accessibility tasks, they are most effective when combined with manual functional testing methods. This combination ensures that everyone, regardless of their disability, can use your website with or without assistive technologies.