When Designing a website that’s as much successful as it is effective takes time, skills, and a lot of testing. Normally, when we’re talking about web design and we hear the word testing, the first thing that comes to mind is usability, and that’s fine, but when was the last time you sat down to analyse the level of accessibility of your website?

Testing on other aspects of your website are important but it’s seems that a lot of us seem to neglect our websites accessibility. This can ultimately lead to the loss of a wide range of users and poor elements of design.  But you not to fear anymore, below we’ve compiled a set of tools that will help you combat poor accessibility.

All tool featuring in this article is either free or you might have to pay a small fee to use but these tools has been chosen because it’s easy to use and offers a quality testing.

1. Colour Blindness Simulator

The Colour Blindness Simulator will help you assess how accessible images and colours are seen through the eyes of an individual who is colorblind. You’re able to quickly upload a JPEG image of about 1000px by 1000px and analyse how you’ll be able to make your web pages more accessible to users that may be colour blind.

2. LinkPatch

Broken links make web pages and other areas of your website inaccessible, this is why it’s important to use a tool such as Link Patch to check the amount of broken links on any URL you choose. With Link Patch you can achieve the above and, install your “tracking” code in a few seconds, make use of the great user interface, you’ll have smart notifications, and a round-the-clock monitoring.

3. AccessColor

Access Color tests the color contrast and color brightness between the foreground and background of all elements in the DOM to make sure that the contrast is high enough for people with visual impairments. Assuring that you provide enough color contrast between foreground and background colors takes time and we hope that this tool will help web developers to build accessible websites by visually flagging the section(s) of a page with problematic color combination’s. Access Color will find the relevant colour combination’s within your HTML and CSS documents rather than requiring you to find each value to input yourself in order to test the contrast between each colour combination.

4. Juicy Studios Image Analyzer

With this tool we’re able to examine each and every image found on a specified web page for accessibility problems. The tool will carefully examine the width, height, alt, and longdesc attributes to determine if they are fitted with their corresponding values. The accessibility on your website also depends on how well users are able to interact with images and how they are displayed. This why this Image Analyzer is a great tool.

5. WAVE

WAVE is an interactive tool that shows you the level of accessibility on your website in three different styles: “Errors, Features, and Alerts”, “Structure/Order”, and Text–Only”. All you’d have to do is enter the URL of your site, and get to view your results. You’ll also receive instant feedback on the placement and identification of every element. You’ll be notified of any JavaScript present, HTML errors, incorrect navigational structure and much more.