5 must-have digital accessibility tools to create inclusive, equitable websites

As more and more of our daily lives move online—from ecommerce and communication to education and healthcare—equal access to the internet has never been more critical. Yet over 70% of websites don’t meet accessibility standards, leaving more than 1 billion people with visual, auditory, cognitive, or physical impairments behind.

This isn’t just a moral obligation: it’s a legal one, too. Legislation such as the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) require organizations to adhere to digital accessibility guidelines, with penalties for non-compliance. 

And of course, there’s the commercial implication. Businesses that make their sites accessible to everyone tap into a larger market—then deliver excellent, inclusive customer experiences (CX) to turn these users into loyal advocates.

But how do you ensure your website is meeting the gold standard? That’s where digital accessibility tools come in. With the right tools, you can be confident your site aligns with key global frameworks such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), to guide you in improving CX, avoiding legal risks, boosting revenue, and contributing to a more equitable internet for all.  

Read on to discover the 5 digital accessibility tools you need to get started today.

Key insights

• According to the WCAG, the 4 principles of digital accessibility are Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. Use the acronym POUR to guide you when assessing accessibility and making decisions. 

• Every team has a role to play, from design and content to user experience (UX) and product development. Use role-specific checklists (like these free ones from the Contentsquare Foundation) to understand how you can incorporate accessibility into your workflow and adopt an accessibility-first mindset.

• The right tech stack doesn’t just reveal accessibility issues—it shows you the impact of them. Tools like session replays, heatmaps, journey analysis, and user tests contextualize how inaccessibility affects users and your business, while voice-of-customer (VoC) feedback lets customers express their needs in their own words.    

1. Understand user needs with Contentsquare

Contentsquare is an experience intelligence platform that reveals how users behave on your site from beginning to end, so you can understand and empathize with their experiences to make data-driven improvements.

Use the platform’s Experience Analytics product to uncover and analyze issues that impact digital accessibility in real time, like frustrating layouts, difficult-to-use forms, or unintuitive journeys, then prioritize fixes that empower everyone. For example:

• See which elements users interact with and which ones they miss with Heatmaps. This capability provides visual representations of where users click, scroll, and move on your page. Reveal issues like low color contrast buttons that may not be clear to users and too-small form fields that may be difficult for users to click on.

• Use the Journey Analysis capability to identify unintuitive or looping pathways and spot drop-off points linked to potential accessibility issues. Find forms that can’t be interacted with using keyboard navigation or bottlenecks that suggest your content is confusing, preventing users from finding what they’re looking for.

• Complement your digital accessibility testing with Session Replays, a capability that provides recordings of individual users navigating your site. Watch replays of pages flagged by your accessibility audit to see how these issues affect real users, then make adjustments as needed. 

💡Pro tip: streamline research and accelerate insights with AI-powered Session Replay Summaries. Contentsquare’s AI, Sense, reviews hours of recordings so you don’t have to, uncovering behavioral trends, identifying potential issues and extracting key takeaways from one or multiple session replays. 

Then, incorporate Contentsquare’s Voice-ofCustomer capabilities to capture real feedback, using tools like 

• Surveys: use the AI-powered survey generator to instantly create surveys based on your research goal (like “Is this site accessible to everyone?”) and get summary reports of the results with clear analysis and next steps. 

• Interviews: get in-depth insights from user interviews. Invite existing customers to interviews or choose from Contentsquare’s diverse pool of over 200,000 global participants to understand more about specific needs and requirements.

• User Tests: conduct unmoderated user testing with a diverse range of users—such as those using screen readers, users with motor function impairments, or people with dyslexia—to ensure you catch any accessibility issues before launching a new site or product.

Impact at Contentsquare

In 2021, Contentsquare launched the Contentsquare Foundation, a Contentsquare impact initiative that’s devoted to breaking down accessibility barriers.

In addition to helping organizations create more inclusive experiences, the foundation developed a tool called Readapt, a free and open source assistive technology that enables people to customize their digital reading experience based on their needs. 

Learn more about Readapt

Readapt lets you create customized reading profiles and adapts digital content to your preferences to improve the reading experience

2. Instantly identify accessibility issues with WAVE by WebAIM

The Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE) by WebAIM is a free online tool that lets you enter any live URL to evaluate its accessibility. It checks against WCAG requirements to find issues and provides a visual breakdown of your site, summarizing results into 6 categories to help you understand how to build an accessible website for everyone:

• Errors: critical issues that impact accessibility and fail to meet WCAG requirements, such as images without alternative (alt) text, missing form labels, or empty links. These errors make parts of your site unusable by assistive technologies or people with certain impairments, so you should address them as priority.

• Contrast errors: text that does not meet WCAG contrast requirements, making it difficult to read by people with visual impairments like color blindness or low vision

• Alerts: elements that may cause accessibility issues for some users. These include long alt text for images, skipped heading levels, and orphaned form labels, which could present problems and should be double-checked by your team.

• Features: elements that improve accessibility that you’ve already incorporated, like skip links and alt text best practices

• Structural elements: the heading structure and content hierarchy of the page, including elements like lists and footers. Teams should review these structural elements to ensure they accurately reflect the priorities of the page, as this hierarchy is essential to enable users with screen readers to navigate it correctly.

• ARIA: where Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) properties or labels have been used on the page. ARIA is a way of making certain features, like dynamic content, more accessible to assistive technologies; however, when used incorrectly, it can often reduce accessibility, so teams should be careful.

Clicking on any of the icons on the page or in the ‘Details’ tab gives you more information, including where they appear, an explanation of the issue, links to applicable WCAG guidelines, and a way to quickly see the relevant HTML code.

WAVE also offers Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge browser extensions for easier, more efficient accessibility testing.

The Summary panel in WAVE (left) gives you an overview of accessibility issues. Clicking on the icons on the page gives you the option to learn more or check the code.

3. Build accessibility into your code with axe DevTools

axe DevTools from Deque are web and mobile accessibility tools that help development teams proactively catch issues when coding. Integrating accessibility testing tools into your development workflow helps teams follow best practices and enforce compliance at code level, so you can create accessible experiences from day one. 

Their product suite lets you

• Analyze static code as you work in your integrated development environment (IDE), providing instant feedback and flagging problems before you push them to live production

• Run AI-powered automated accessibility tests of your app, user flows, or specific page components from your web browser

• Automatically build accessibility checks into your code commit process and prevent the release of code with usability issues

Use axeDevTools to catch inaccessible code and tell developers how to fix it

4. Spot visual issues with WCAG Color Contrast Checker

Use the free WCAG Color Contrast Checker from WCAG Plus to test the contrast ratio between any 2 colors and ensure they meet accessibility requirements. 

Poor color contrast impacts the ability of users with visual impairments—like people with color blindness, low vision, or cataracts—to read your content and use your site, making it an essential consideration for designers when selecting color palettes.  

Use a color contrast checker to

• Get a numerical rating and a ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ assessment based on the contrast ratio formula outlined in the WCAG

• Preview how foreground and background colors work together to ensure accessibility compliance

• Visualize and test text and icons at different sizes

WCAG Plus also offers a color blindness simulator, ChromaSim, which you can use to see how your images or icons will appear to users with different types of color vision deficiency.

Test the contrast ratio of any 2 colors with WCAG Plus’ free tool

5. Test screen reader readiness with NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA)

Many users who are blind rely on screen readers (text-to-speech software that reads out the content of a webpage or translates it into braille) to access the internet. Screen readers require websites to have logical navigation with a clear hierarchy (like headings and subheadings) to work effectively, so it’s important to structure your site with this in mind.

💡 Pro tip: well-structured and formatted content doesn’t just benefit screen readers, it makes it easier for everyone to quickly scan and get the information they need at a glance—including AI and search engines that are ranking your site.

Incorporate a screen reader into your toolkit and use it as part of your accessibility audit to identify issues that make your site inaccessible to users with visual impairments.

NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) is a free screen reader available for Microsoft Windows that lets you experience your site or product as users with this assistive technology do and perform manual testing. Use it to

• Evaluate whether the speech output matches the visual flow and sequence of your page

• Ensure that content and content types (like lists and tables) are announced correctly

• Test how interactive elements are announced when you tab through the page

• Confirm that all visual information, like graphics or charts, have descriptive alt text that accurately conveys the meaning

• Review whether video or audio content matches the associated transcript and include audio descriptions that identify different people or actions

• Check that all input fields (like text boxes and date pickers on forms) have associated labels that clearly indicate what input to provide

Other popular screen readers include JAWS (Job Access With Speech), a paid software that offers speech and braille output for Windows; VoiceOver, Apple’s built-in screen reading tool for Mac and iOS; and TalkBack, Android’s built-in screen reader.

Ensure your website is inclusive with accessibility testing tools

Website accessibility is everybody’s concern. It’s not just about compliance—it’s about creating an accessible internet for all. 

Using digital accessibility tools as part of your design and development process is a powerful way to advocate for inclusion and amplify your organization’s impact for good. With the right tools, you can empathize with users, remove barriers to access, and create delightful, positive experiences for everyone.

FAQs about digital accessibility tools