Accessibility Guide and Toolkit

Accessibility review tools are available to help you identify issues with accessibility, however, similar to spelling and grammar checks, these tools require a human to interpret results, identify additional issues missed in the check, and properly resolve issues. 

The Moodle accessibility check reviews some common text errors and is available from the Atto text editor.

MS Office applications all include an Accessibility Checker to help you identify and resolve accessibility issues within your document. After you check your spelling and grammar, always check your accessibility. 

After you run the check, the Inspection Results will display a list of warnings unique to your document. Click the down arrow next to an item for recommended actions to resolve a specific accessibility issue. Under ‘Additional Information’, you can read more about why you want to fix the issue and what steps you can take to fix the issue.

Foxit Phantom PDF offers two tools for help with reviewing the accessibility of your file, the Foxit Phantom PDF Accessibility Action Wizard and the Foxit Phantom PDF Full Accessibility Check.  The Full Accessibility Check is included as the last step of the Accessibility Action Wizard. Similar to MS Office, Foxit Phantom PDF's Accessibility tools also recommend actions to resolve issues so you know how to fix your content.

Visit WebAim for more comprehensive instructions about resolving Foxit Phantom PDF accessibility issues.

You can save a great deal of effort remediating PDF files if you focus on incorporating accessibility features into your original Word document.  However, if you're savvy enough to build PDFs from scratch, you likely have the foundational skills necessary to manually tag your document for accessibility.

For reviewing the accessibility of web content, WebAIM’s WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool can help you identify accessibility issues for a specific URL. To use the WAVE tool, copy and paste your web page address into the input field and click the arrow to review accessibility.

You can also enable the WAVE Evaluation Tool Chrome Extension to help evaluate accessibility at the click of a button or on a password-protected page.

Learn more about using the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool.

Watch an introductory video for the WAVE Evaluation tool.  

Remember that the WAVE tool is just that, a tool, it is not a test of accessibility. The WAVE tool informs but does not replace manual accessibility evaluation by a human.