One of the things a website designer or administrator needs to keep in mind is the user experience of their site's visitors, including those visitors who may have visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive difficulties. WAVE, a free web accessibility evaluation tool developed by WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind), provides a simple way to check the accessibility of a web page's content. After entering the URL of interest on WAVE's main page, WAVE will display the page marked up with embedded icons indicating potential accessibility errors, alerts, features, and other information. The left sidebar presents a summary of what WAVE detected on the entered page, and users can click the embedded icons or explore the sidebar for brief explanations of their meaning. WAVE is intended to facilitate human evaluation, and thus it does not provide a score or pass/fail metric, nor can it correct problems. For those wishing to check the accessibility of password-protected or otherwise sensitive pages, WAVE also offers browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox.
Comments