WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool Educational Services Reviews & Insights

We use this for very basic accessibility testing for our websites and applications and is by no means a comprehensive breakdown of the state of accessibility.

This is pretty middle of the road. It does a good job of picking out some of the low-hanging fruit, but it's not going properly evaluate semantic structure and will pop several false positives. Additionally, the tools are incomplete. For instance, the contrast editor will allow you to test your colors with sliders so you can get the closest color that passes; however, that isn't how color palettes work, you generally don't get to change a companies palette without a lot of pain; furthermore, there is no ability to adjust the font-size and both font-size AND color are used to determine contrast requirements. Oh, and they use points VS pixels...nobody is using points on the web even if the ADA uses them in their fairly dated guidelines. Text from the actual contrast editor "Text is present that has a contrast ratio less than 4.5:1, or large text (larger than 18 point or 14 point bold) has a contrast ratio less than 3:1.". 14pt = 18.66 pixels, so I can see their logic even if I don't agree with it.

I routinely use the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool browser extension to check accessibility for web pages and web content. I primarily use it to give vendors a clear and understandable way to see the accessibility errors in their websites as well as in content they want us to embed on our websites. The tool helps us keep our partners meeting at least the bare minimum for accessibility.

I recommend this tool all the time. It's a great, free way to, at-a-glance, gauge the basic accessibility of a web page. It catches most of the glaring issues and provides an easy way to quickly show a client or vendor where some fundamental issues are and how to resolve them. Given the price, you can't go wrong. It does not replace manual review, or even a more powerful site scanner, but it's a great, quick, foot-in-the-door to explain what accessibility is, why it matters and what some basic issues and fixes are.