Hi Emily,
I am an accessibility coordinator in our online education department. With 10 years of experience, I probably rely more on testing with a screen reader or on reading the HTML than using tools. But, these are the tools I like:
- [Built-in accessibility checkers in Canvas, Microsoft, and Adobe Acrobat]
- TPGi's color contrast analyzer
- WebAIM's color contrast analyzer bookmarklet - a good alternative for those who can't/won't install TPGi's program (It doesn't work on the Windows version of Mozilla Firefox)
- Images Bookmarklet - reveals all alt text at once to help sighted individuals check for description completeness and accuracy more quickly.
- Title Attributes Bookmarklet - reveals all title attributes at once so I can determine if iframes have title attributes and if the attributes accurately describe the iframe's (or other) content.
- 24 by 24 pixel cursor bookmarklet - a good (but visual only) tool for ensuring sufficient spacing around links in a list and buttons which are close together
- PAC for PDFs - a very technical checker (e.g. Do you know what a bounding box is? I didn't before this checker.). It also checks for PDF/UA compliance. Would not recommend it for those who are not working with PDFs on a near daily basis.
- For testing external web resources (i.e. those which are linked, embedded, or integrated in the course)
- Wave Checker and its browser extension - Good for beginners but not great for testing full compliance. Also, is unable work on some web resources.
- ANDI bookmarklet - Good yet slightly technical tool for testing WCAG 2.0 AA compliance. Also, is unable work on some web resources (particularly several password protected ones). -- This is the tool that those who complete the free Trusted Tester Certification are taught to use.
- Text Spacing bookmarklet - Something I use to supplement ANDI to test for a WCAG 2.1 criteria. This bookmarklet would also be generally used on external web resourced.
- Bookmarklets that reveal the focus indicator when the external web resource has either hidden or mismanaged focus:
Our institution also uses Yuja Panorama in Canvas. It is a good tool, but the projects I have had since its acquisition have not lent themselves to me using it often (except, perhaps the analytics side).
