Accessibility Testing Tools: Browser Extensions

Join Natalie Garza and accessibility expert Natalie MacLees on the 18th episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast as they discuss various browser extensions that aid in digital accessibility testing. They provide a comprehensive overview of popular tools like the Web Developer extension, aXe by Deque, WAVE by WebAIM, and IBM’s Equal Access Accessibility Checker. The episode also introduces AAArdvark’s tool for automated and manual accessibility audits and highlights the importance of combining automated testing with manual audits for effective accessibility compliance.

Natalie Garza: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This is episode 18. I’m Natalie Garza, and with us today is,

Natalie MacLees: Natalie MacLees

Natalie Garza: and she’s an accessibility expert here to teach us new things about digital accessibility. So, in this episode, we wanted to start the conversation. Not fully go through the whole topic because it’s just so expansive; we wanted to start talking about tools to help with accessibility testing, starting with browser extensions.

Natalie MacLees: Yes, browser extensions, which I think is where a lot of people get started. I think a lot of people, a browser extension is their first experience with scanning a webpage for issues and finding out about accessibility testing.

Natalie Garza: Yeah. And again, disclaimer: there’s a lot of ways, a lot of methods, a lot of tools to help you with accessibility testing. We’re just gonna start cracking the surface here. Natalie, what should we expect from a browser extension, and what’s out there right now?

Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so browser extension, you’ll install it in your browser and they, they have accessibility extensions for Chrome, for Firefox, for Edge. So it doesn’t matter which browser you’re using; you install it, and then usually there’s a little button that you click somewhere in the extension to say, scan this page.

And it’ll go through the page and find any of the issues that can be identified by an automated checker, which is, it depends on who you talk to, but somewhere between 20 and 30% of the different types of accessibility issues that can be found on a page can be found by a checker. And then, it will show you some kind of interface to show you what those errors are so that you can figure out what’s going on in your site and have an idea of how to get it fixed.

Natalie Garza: Yeah, and I also feel like there’s another category of browser extensions where it helps you flag stuff down.

Natalie MacLees: Yeah. That’ll help you turn on different things make information that’s normally invisible on the website visible, so it makes testing easier because you can see something that you wouldn’t normally be able to see.

Natalie Garza: Right. It’s kind of like an x-ray.

Natalie MacLees: Like an X-ray. Sure. An MRI. It’s a CAT scan.

Natalie Garza: Yeah. But without the dangers of radiation poisoning.

Natalie MacLees: No radiation involved. Well, no, that’s not probably not true. I’m sure that all of our devices are emitting radiation at us all the time.

Natalie Garza: True, true, true. EMF. Anyway, do you wanna go over some popular browser extensions and what they do?

Natalie MacLees: Sure. Yeah, so if you’ve watched any of our live streams where I go through accessibility testing live, you’ve probably seen me use the