Best Tools for Checking Web Accessibility

I’m now working on the accessibility chapter of Refactoring HTML. I’d like to mention some automated tools for checking accessibility. The W3C lists a couple of dozen. Which are the best? If you had to pick just two or three, which would you choose?

I’m especially interested in tools that go beyond mere validation. That’s more automatic and more easily handled. Assuming the document is already strict XHTML+CSS, what else can a tool look for?

3 Responses to “Best Tools for Checking Web Accessibility”

  1. Augusto Sellhorn Says:

    The only tool I’m familiar with and used to play with was “Bobby”.

    One thing is for sure, don’t include that in your list. Just checked it out again and it’s totally change and doesn’t seem to work at all (it’s called Watchfire WebXACT).

    Sorry I guess that’s a negative recommendation, not really what you were looking for but still …

  2. stephen Says:

    They’re all terrible. Bobby was tolerable when it was being developed by CAST, but Watchfire has destroyed it.

  3. James Orenchak, CISSP Says:

    The tool that I’ve used over and over again is Tidy (http://tidy.sourceforge.net/). Tidy won’t fix all errors itself, but ii does fix errors that it’s sure are bad and produces a list of which statements may be mistakes and where the statements are located.

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