Accessibility Tools

LiveWhale
1

Hello,

We’re looking into potentially acquiring an accessibility tool for our website. Two things:

1. Any updates to what LiveWhale may offer?
2. What third-party tools are other schools using? How are you using it, and what are the pros/cons you’ve identified?

Thanks,
Nick

2

Thanks Nick – interested to hear what others are using!

We see LiveWhale as operating in a complementary fashion to a11y tools but not being responsible for a11y testing/scanning in and of itself. (We’re always thinking about a11y and improving functionality, especially with 3.0 coming up and the opportunity to make breaking changes to help take some leaps ahead—but that’s different from the task of scanning/cataloging front-end a11y reports.)

I’ve seen a11y reports from folks using SiteImprove and Popetech recently, but I look forward to hearing anything others have to add as the pros/cons of their various tools.

3

We have been using SiteImprove for many years and are happy with it. It, like any automated checker, is just one tool, though. It can only report on things that can be detected by machines. It is not a substitute for human review.

There are other similar tools available, but we’ve never had a compelling reason to switch. We use SiteImprove for many other things besides accessibility. For us, it is a vital tool in our processes.

Happy to answer any questions if you have any.

4

We used to use SiteImprove and it is great - does a lot more than just accessibility checking - but it was a little too expensive. We tried something else for a while but it wasn’t really up to what we needed. We finally went to Monsido (now Acquia Optimize) and it has been a good fit. It also does a lot more than just accessibility checking.

I echo what @jwilcox said about scanners just being part of the solution, and will add that in my experience, not two checkers will report the same set of errors for a given page.

One important thing to keep in mind is that your checker should be able to check the page post-js, not just the html on the server.

Also, there are lots of single-page checkers - WAVE checker from WebAIM (https://wave.webaim.org/) being just one. In the last big wave of accessibility complaints against higher ed websites around 6 years ago that was one thing OCR was using to look at pages.

Also echo @jwilcox 's statement about human review being necessary…

Happy to discuss further…

Best,

-= G =-