Koa11y

Considering that with each passing year, more and more people are gaining access to the Internet, it could be argued that web accessibility is one of the most important aspects that should be taken into account when it comes to the web infrastructure as a whole.

That said, since there are millions of people with disabilities that affect their use of the web worldwide, you might want to think about this type of things, especially if your website is a very popular one.

Of course, in order to achieve that, you first need to find the problem or pinpoint what can be improved and how, a task for which you can rely on a very interesting app that goes by the name of Koa11y (read Koally).

In just a few words, this cross-platform, Electron-based application makes it as straightforward as possible for you to detect accessibility issues on practically any website, based on four accessibility standards: Section508 (mostly for the US), WCAG2A, WCAG2AA, and WCG2AAA.

Despite what you might imagine, it's an easy application to work with since it does not have any special requirements, it does not require installation, and the GUI is quite straightforward.

To get started, simply paste the website's address in the URL bar, add a custom filename for the report if the automatically generated one is not to your liking, pick the report's format (HTML, CSV, JSON, Markdown, and XML are supported), the output folder, and, of course one of the four available accessibility formats.

Before you hit "Run!," please note that there's also an image accessibility section which can be used to paste the console code. Basically, this optional feature allows you to gather some useful information about the images from a webpage.

All that's left to do now is open the generated report with a compatible app, analyze the results and start fixing potential problems one by one. It's also worth pointing out that the reports consist of a list of errors, warnings, and notices, all accessibility-related.

Evaluating the accessibility of a certain website usually requires a fair bit of human touch. Koa11y simplifies this process to a great extent and can really help any web developer take significant steps towards achieving a friendlier website for users suffering from visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive and other types of disabilities.

As a bonus, it works on all the key OSes out there: Windows, macOS, and Linux.