Free tools to help monitor accessibility

You don't always have to pay to be able to monitor accessibility. There are also good free options available. While they likely are not nearly as feature-rich as the paid alternatives, they do still work and help out a lot.

Self-hosted tools

If you can host a tool, there are several free options.

Pa11y Dashboard

If you are a developer, you might have heard about Pa11y before. Pa11y dashboard is a web interface to the Pa11y accessibility reporter.

Pa11y Dashboard is available on GitHub.

Salvia

Salvia is the tool the Regional State Administrative Agency uses to do their accessibility monitoring. They have released the source code of the tool on GitHub.

Getting Salvia to work will require some developer knowledge.

The user interface of the tool is nice to use. The results the tool gives aren't the best if you are new to accessibility. But still, the tool is available to us for free, so can't complain! The Regional State Administrative Agency has information about the licensing of the tool on its website. Make sure to check that before you use the tool.

Tools to check single pages

If neither of the self-hosted or paid services are an option for you, don't worry. There are a lot of free tools available that don't require coding expertise.

Deque Axe DevTools (free version)

Axe DevTools has a free version available. While the tool is not as comprehensive without paying for it, the tool is still my favourite.

The user interface is nice and the descriptions of all issues are very clear.

Unfortunately, at the moment I can't afford to get the paid version of the tool. But I've seen a demo of it and it is incredible.

The browser extension is available on Chrome, Firefox and Edge.

Lighthouse

Available by default in Chrome. You can access it from the developer tools in the browser.

You can use the tool to check the mobile or desktop version of the page. There are multiple categories you can check results for:

• performance,
• accessibility,
• best practices,
• SEO and Progressive Web App.

Wave

I hear a lot of people use this tool. I prefer other tools, but there is nothing wrong with Wave. Wave comes as a browser extension or a website. So if you don't want to install any plugins, check out Wave. The site also provides links to install the browser extensions. A browser extension is available for Chrome, Firefox and Edge.

HTML_CodeSniffer

Browser bookmarklet that scans the page for errors, warnings and notices. This was one of the first tools I learned to use actively.

My thoughts on the free tools

I love that we have free tools available! The more people can use tools to help with accessibility monitoring, the better the internet will become. Assuming, of course, that the issues get fixed.

Not everyone can afford the paid tools, especially when many of them seem to be directed towards larger organisations. Hopefully, this will change in the future and we'll see more affordable options.

The free tools do help a lot when it comes to accessibility monitoring. I've been using free tools for many years and I've been able to work on accessibility audits with them. Since I joined Exove, I've had access to paid tools. It has made a difference, but I still also use some of these free tools even if I have access to a paid tool.

There are also a lot of great plugins for checking for specific things like headings and their levels or landmarks. Check my accessibility site for links to some of the ones I like to use.