Current Accessibility Tools

DRES, a division of the College of Applied Health Sciences (AHS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been involved with designing and developing software tools for accessibility since the early 2000’s. The main tools it has developed are:

Evaluation Tools

FAE and AInspector WCAG provide comprehensive web accessibility evaluations, organized by rule categories. They share the same OpenA11y Evaluation Library and rulesets, but differ in other important ways.

FAE is a web application that evaluates entire websites and generates multiple levels of reports, organized by evaluation rule categories. The generated reports can be saved for future reference by registering for an account.

AInspector WCAG is a Firefox browser add-on that evaluates a single page and provides results that can be navigated in the browser sidebar. As in FAE, the results are organized by evaluation rule categories, but are not readily archivable.

Visualization Tools

The Accessibility Bookmarklets is a suite of tools that provide web developers and designers with ways of visualizing accessibility features and information that is otherwise hidden on the page.

They do not evaluate the page based on accessibility requirements or rules, but are useful for gaining an overview of particular categories of accessibility requirements, as well as performing certain types of manual checks.

Embedded HTML Editor for Producing Accessible Content

The A11yFirst for CKEditor project seeks to transform the web content authoring model from reactive to proactive, by creating an authoring environment that supports accessibility by default.

Web Accessibility Tools User Group

The Open Source Web Accessibility Tools User Group seeks input and feedback from designers, developers and web accessibility evaluators interested in open source tools.

Please see the Open Source Web Accessibility Tools User Group page for more information.

Installation and Getting Started

To install and/or use the individual tools, please visit: