Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Testing by Developers

You can find accessibility testing tools online and on the desktop for everything from smaller scale testing to enterprise level tools that allow you to track progress over time, automate reporting, and allow for manual review in conjunction with automated tests.

These items should be in every web developer’s toolkit. In addition to their use for informal accessibility testing, they are often useful for general web development as well.

Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox/Mozilla (http://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=60)

An extension for Firefox and Mozilla, the Web Developer Toolbar provides a host of tools that are useful for low-level accessibility testing. It allows you to easily disable CSS and JavaScript, as well as replace images with their alt text. Quick access to these tools helps assess your work against the guidelines presented in this chapter.

Accessibility Toolbar for Internet Explorer (http://www.nils.org.au/ais/web/resources/toolbar/)

Similar to the Web Developer Toolbar, the Accessibility Toolbar is designed to work in Internet Explorer for Windows. It provides quick access to many of the same types of tools found in the Web Developer Toolbar, as well as one-click launching of several online services that allow you to roughly analyze readability of passages of text, color contrast analysis, various other vision-related disabilities, and online automated testing tools.

Opera browser (http://www.opera.com)

The Opera browser is actually ...