Just to be clear – with content creators I mean those who are responsible for the content of a webpage or native mobile application. So, those that use the content management system (CMS) or edit the content in any other similar way. You can also think editors, writers, authors. Roles that need to create and edit the content on a webpage or mobile app or a document. As content is not just text and can also be audio only, video only, video with audio, images etc.
Different accessibility tools often cover all roles but provide info mostly for developers
There are many accessibility tools for developers, I think that most of the tools available are most suitable for developers actually. As it’s easy to make a tool that check the code and provide what is wrong with it. Developers are also very used to use such tools. Some are already integrated into their IDE (Integrated Development Environment), some can be easily added afterwards. Browsers offer a lot of developer tools as well. And there are millions of browser extensions, a lot of them targeting also developers. Automatic testing tools are often integrated into delivery and those tools can be upgraded with accessibility testing as well. I wrote a lot about efficiency of automatic accessibility tools, it’s far from perfect, but it does help sometimes, especially with validation of HTML, ARIA and CSS.
Then we have the tools for designers. Automatic accessibility tools for design are still long behind developer tools as design is very visual and to test visual parts we need special software. Often also a lot of computer power (machine learning powered computer vision), so there are not so many tools out there that are specialized in design.
Color contrast checkers, color combination with color contrast checkers, annotation tools for their design tools are quite usual. Some automatic tools also offer advanced computer vision based detectors for components, like “this element look like a button but is not coded as one”, so they are again spanning between design and code. I have tested some and see the potential, but I didn’t happen to find a tool that would help designers alone.
It’s obvious – code is most suitable for tools made with code. At least for now. I do see the possibilities for Large Language Models that can “see” the image to be used for design testing, but they need to become more robust first.
When we consider content providers, we don’t have as many tools targeting them specifically. They are often forced to use the same tools as developers and designers and it often means they need to interpret extremely technical tools and concentrate on the parts that are really important for their role and ignore the other ones. Sure, such tools often come with tagging and filtering, so it’s not difficult to filter out information for specific role, but on the other hand there are still lots of overlapping where content provider and developer “share” responsibility.
So basically we don’t have a lot of tools that are targeting content creators specifically, but they often need to use tools that cover all roles. Which is fine if they have the knowledge and the time to filter out findings that are beyond their responsibilities.
Where can accessibility tools actually help content creators?
The most obvious content oriented accessibility help that tools provide:
- Document outline – heading levels define it, and sometimes (especially long textual content) it’s useful to have a tool to visualize the hierarchy.
- Alternative text on images, still a huge problem on the web, so a tool can help detect issues and potential issues.
- Table semantics, when we design a table in the editor we need to know what are table headings and what are normal cells, at the minimum.
- Link text – to prevent too much text in them, or all the learn more and click here or even empty link texts.
- Poor text contrast, when content creator changes the color and color doesn’t come from the default design, at least.
- Declaration of page language, languages of parts and page title checks that can prevent issues.
- Embedded content with iframes require context related title and a tool can remind the content creator to fill in the title.
- Depending on the language we can also use tools that estimate the readability.
Content creator tools for accessibility that I know about
I wanted to check what is available specifically for content creators and I did happen to find some useful tools. Some of them are free, some of them are not. Some of them come built in, some of them needs to be installed by developers. Most of them are quite basic, but sometimes it is all we need.
Before we dive into them – I think it is actually difficult to make an accessibility tool that target content providers alone as some parts of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) can’t be solely content creators responsibility and are a responsibility of multiple roles.
Accessibility tools integrated into CMS (by default)
In WordPress (still very popular part of the web), by default (in block editor), under document overview toolbar, WordPress has the document outline view (opens in new window), when we are in write mode. This one is directly related with the headings structure, visually representing the document outline that we made with different title levels. Extremely useful for longer posts.
Drupal is known to have focus on accessibility and there are some default Drupal accessibility features worth checking (opens in new window).
Joomla offers Jooa11y accessibility checker (opens in new window) as a default system plugin. It’s based on Sa11y, that I will mention later in the post.
I just scratched the surface here, especially when we consider all the plugin possibilities out there.
I can also mention that some “low code” website builders offer quite good support for accessibility if users use the features available.
Accessibility tools integrated into content editing tools
Some content editing tools, often called What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) tools offer basic accessibility checks targeting content creators:
- CKEditor 4 (reached end of life in 2023) offered Accessibility Support (opens in new window), unfortunately I am not able to see if later versions of CKEditor offer something similar,
- TinyMCE offers an extra that also needs extra payment (open in new window) that includes basic accessibility testing.
CMS agnostic accessibility tools for content creators
We need to separate CMS agnostic accessibility tools into at least two groups – the ones that can be integrated into webpages and the other group covering those that are isolated from CMS (like external services, browser extensions, bookmarklets and similar).
Accessibility tools that can be integrated into webpage
Sa11y the accessibility quality assurance assistant (opens in new window), open source and very feature rich. It started as a fork of Tota11y by Khan Academy that is end of life for some years. It’s available as a standalone script, browser extension or even bookmarklet. I like the concept so much that I consider extending it. More to follow.
Editoria11y Accessibility Checker (opens in new window) is actually a fork of Sa11y made by Princeton University. It’s available as a standalone script, Drupal module, WordPress plugin and even SquareSpace Injector.
Accessibility tools that are isolated from the page
There are lots of tools that can crawl the website “from the outside” and collect all automatically detectable accessibility issues. Often they don’t only provide content creators with information, as mentioned at the start of this post they offer mostly code based checks.
Some of the tools are extremely advanced and offer much more than just the accessibility checking – for example spelling errors, dead links reports, readability scores (indicate how difficult and complex is the text) and often also a lot of Search Engine Optimization tools. They often also come with a large price tag.
Conclusion – check multiple tools and improve your accessibility
Tools help a lot, even when they are limited, they can still help us to make the content better and more accessible.
In this post I just wanted to list out some of tools that are worth checking, but as accessibility gets more awareness more tools for it are being developed and the list will only grow, I suspect. W3c consortium offers a list of lots of accessibility tools (opens in new window) and search engine is your best friend for your specific CMS.
I am also certain that the latest improvements in Large Language Models (LLM) and all other “artificial intelligence” (AI) possibilities will soon also be a part of accessibility tooling. With time we will be able to get more out of tools, they will cover more of WCAG and they will provide a lot of tips to content creators (developers and designers as well).
For the end – it will still be needed to understand the accessibility though, automation needs to be controlled by a human understanding the context and the intentions of it. Please don’t trust products that over promise things (like accessibility overlays).
