5 tools for Designing, Developing, and Testing Accessibility

No matter what you are working on, considering accessibility is definitely a best practice. Below is a list of five tools to help get you started with accessibility in your projects.

Stark

This tool provides a wide array of color and contrast checking abilities along with simulators to test you design again visual disabilities.

Stark has plugins to go in various design tools, but also in chrome.

Deque's Dev tools AXE extension

There are extensions/add-ons for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.

Additionally, Lighthouse accessibility checks are powered by AXE Core as well.

WAVE

WAVE is powered by WebAim and functions similarly to Deque's AXE extensions.

An interesting element of WAVE's functionality is that it give an accessibility markup over the entire site.

ANDI - Accessibility Testing Tool

ANDI (Accessible Name & Description Inspector) is a free accessibility testing tool.

• ANDI allows you to inspect your page on the basis of accessible names which come in handy especially if you're working with interactive elements.

Linting

VS Code AXE Accessibility Linter

Checks React (.js, .jsx, .ts, .tsx), Vue (.vue), HTML (.html, .htm), and Markdown (.md, .markdown) files so you can avoid common accessibility defects. Angular (HTML) is not currently supported.

ESlint Accessibility Plugins

There several different plugin depending on what framework/ tech stack you're working with.

• I work a lot in React so my team frequently uses this plugin:
  • eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y