Learning about Accessibility is an incremental journey of developing your technical and creative skill sets. There are a lot of practices, principles, and details to discern, and it can be a challenge to become fluent. It's incredibly hard to know what you don’t know so you can know what you know… you know?
Happily, there are a lot of great free tools available to supplement and enhance your own skills. AATT is presenting a partial list of our favorite extensions, plugins, and tools.
- WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool) is a good starting point to find the most common accessibility errors on a website. You can access WAVE via the WAVE website. There are also browser extensions for Chrome and Edge, and an add-on for Firefox which can simplify the process of checking a single page for accessibility errors. The University will soon be rolling out a tool called PopeTech which will allow you to scan your entire website using the WAVE tool.
- UDOIT (Universal Design Online Content Inspection Tool is designed to help identify and fix accessibility issues in Canvas.
- Headings Map is a Chrome Extension & FireFox Addon that quickly identifies headings and hierarchies in webpages.
- WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) Color Contrast Checker scans a webpage for contrast issues.
- Microsoft Accessibility Checker is integrated into Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. You can find it in under the Review Tab in all versions of Office Products.
- Adobe Acrobat Check Accessibility Feature. Accessible PDFs are complex documents, and it can be challenging to make them accessible. Adobe has some great resources to guide you through the required steps.
As always, these tools aren’t foolproof and they have their strengths and limitations. We encourage you to continue to build your knowledge with free courses like the Digital Accessible Badging Program. A cohort of UMD employees working through the badging courses started on June 7th, and it’s not too late to join.