Fujitsu Accessibility Assistance

When you develop an accessible site, you would probably incorporate the accessibility test into your QA phase. This is a standard practice, and it is a good practice.

However, you might want to test your code yourself, while still in development. This is a good practice too. If you’re running unit tests on you C# code, why wouldn’t you do something similar for your HTML code?

If you are developing within Visual Studio, the IDE highlights some elements, and offer some tests for accessibility.

But if you don’t use Visual Studio (developing Java maybe?), you need some external tool.

There are many tools that can do automatic checks on your web page. Most of them aren’t for free, or if they are free, they are on-line (which might be a problem, if you are on a secured network).

I was working with a development project, and I need some tools, so they can check for accessibility themselves, before my final test.

After not much of searching, I found out the Fujitsu Accessibility Assistance toolset.

There are 3 tools on that set:

I’m going to focus only on the first and last, as ColorSelector is merely a color-picker and not really an accessibility tool per se.

Both tools are completely stand alone, and they don’t need no Internet access. Both are built with Java, and you will have to download Java runtime to get it to work.

Web Accessibility Inspector

This tool will perform an automated check for WCAG 1.0 (no WCAG 2.0 support yet). The interface is very simple as you can see below:

You can select to check a folder (where you HTML or ASPX files are located), including sub-folders, with the option to drill one layer, two layers or all layers. You can check the level of compliance you wish to check, or to customize the check list, to check only specific guide lines.

A word of caution: do not hit the “version…” button. Due to some bug, it hangs the application (at least it did on my machine).

If you hit the “Setup the environment…” button, you’ll get the following screen:

Here you can setup the browser to use for the check and when watching the result file, setup proxy (if you’re checking your site on-line), and so on.

One of the coolest thing in my opinion, is that the result are being presented as an HTML page, which you can save, print, or send by mail. I’m using it to produce a check list of errors to my team.

The result file shows a summary table, with internal links, to the problem found.

As you can see, the tool checks not only the main file, but also the supporting files (i.e. CSS files, and JaveScript).

Just below that table, you can get a quick view of how many errors you need to fix, to meet each compliance level.

Each error found, is being described in details, including the line number, the compliance level for which this guideline belongs, and a link to the guideline itself on the WCAG web page.

Color Doctor

Now this tool, is a simulation tool, design to show you how your site will be seen in the eyes of a person, having types of color blindness deficiency.

As with the first tool, the interface is very simple:

Just type in the URL to your page (it can be local) and hit the “Go” button. Choose the type of deficiency you wish to check for, and hit the “Convert image”.

Note that only the left pane is scrollable. If you scrolled the left pane, you will have to click the “Convert image” once more. Marking the “Real-time conversion” will scroll and convert the right pane, while you’re scrolling the left pane. Note that the conversion process is heavy, and the scrolling wouldn’t be smooth.

You can use this tool to check images you’re about to use on your site. Just replace the URL with the full path to the image file (i.e. “C:\someFolder\somefile.jpg”) and everything else is just the same.