Tips and Tools

Which tips and tools are right for you depends on whether you're a developer, designer, or content creator. In some cases, regardless of your role, the concepts and tools linked from this page will prove useful.

One of the SOAP site's goals is to make it easy for you to see what's most relevant to your responsibilities. You can see items grouped by rol by visiting the Roles and Responsibilities page. Alternatively, we believe that skimming through the links from this page will give you a good overview of areas for consideration as you work with your colleagues to establish the best strategies for incorporating accessibility throughout a web-based project's lifecycle.

Tips

The short articles linked from the Tips page, with links to additional resources, have been compiled to assist you when you're developing initial requirements or redesigning a site. The tips highlight key issues to consider for a given topic. But the external resources have been vetted to give you the most current details, such as code samples, that you'll likely need.

Stanford-specific guidance will be added as time and resources permit. Your feedback and assistance with creating additional content will be welcome.

Tools

To make it as easy as possible for you to incorporate accessibility-checking into your current workflow, we have selected a number of testing Tools.

No automated web accessibility-checking tool can do everything; such tools can only identify some 20/30% of issues. So, human intervention and decision-making are always required. But use tools for what they can do best for you -- find potential errors based on readily identifiable patterns.

If you want to get an idea of what automated testing can flag, try WebAIM's WAVE service. Just go to the site, paste the url of a publicly-facing page into the edit box, and see what the results are. If you find a number of errors, don't panic. Addressing web accessibility issues is a process, and we're here to help you.

The W3C's Easy Checks resource is another good resource for getting started with manual accessibility checking.

Also useful is the W3C's WCAG-EM Report Tool.

Note that while the Tips and Tools sections are the most robust, at the moment, you will also find resources, linked from this page, related to developing and testing mobile web sites and applications, creating and remediating Adobe and Microsoft Office documents, selecting accessibility-related code patterns, and testing with screen readers.