What Tools Do You Use For ADA Website Compliance Testing?

Thanks to the power of the internet, businesses are expanding their reach at a massive speed. The web is open to everyone and anyone can use this global platform to promote their products and services. When you are making your offerings available to everyone, it is your obligation to ensure accessibility standards. If you are making your commercial website available for everyone, you must make it accessible. If you fail to do so, you may lose your target audience, you may lose the potential leads, you may lose revenue and you may have to face costly litigation.

To make the products widely accessible and to prevent the risk of expensive lawsuits and penalties, businesses are using ADA website compliance checker tools. Using an automated tool helps organizations to comply with ADA and Section 508. In this post, we will find out which tools are the most useful for web accessibility testing.

What is web accessibility testing?

The government mandates that a commercial website must be made accessible to everyone. It includes users with disabilities like hearing problems, vision impairment, cognitive disability or any physical disability. Web accessibility testing is a specialized practice that ensures that a disabled user can access the content without any difficulty.

The accessibility experts use a roadmap given in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It has various success criteria and accessibility levels, that businesses aim to achieve.

An ADA website compliance test can be done via a set of evaluation tools. The testing software codes are developed by keeping the WCAG guidelines in mind and allow users to quickly scan their website’s code and identify problem areas.

The tests ensure that the website content is accessible to people who can’t see, who can’t hear, who can’t properly read or someone who can’t easily scroll or navigate the content.

Which are the must-have ADA website testing tools?

A website ADA compliance checker is the most useful tool for web accessibility measurements. Automated testing results tell if the website is developed across to the WCAG standards.

For standard accessibility testing, you need to utilize testing tools that highlight errors related to contrast ratio, broken or missing links, form filling, PDF accessibility, screen reader compatibility and various success criteria of WCAG 2.1 level AA. The software and browser extensions that top the list of must-have accessibility tools include Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE), Colour Contrast Analyser, JAWS, and ARC Tool Kit.

Most of these tools are free and support browser extensions. An automated test website for ADA compliance delivers results based on the level AA of WCAG 2.1. If you want to aim for AAA level compliance then the warnings or error messages displayed by a testing tool might feel insufficient.

Additionally, businesses can’t solely rely on tools or extensions to perform accessibility testing. Because software scans are programmed in a way that the results delivered are only 30% accurate. For a comprehensive and fool-proof website ADA compliance test, manual audits are considered necessary. Human intervention works better than the limited functioning of a testing tool. The results delivered by automated testing can also be verified with full remediation support by accessibility audit specialists. To learn more about the process of manual audit, visit the link given below.