Evaluate Web Accessibility With WAVE Tool

Checking the accessibility of websites and linked content is integral to ensuring full course accessibility for our students and the community. There are many ways to determine the accessibility of webpages; a good tool for web developers is the Wave Evaluation Tool, which can be added to Chrome or Firefox. WAVE is a web accessibility evaluation tool developed by Web Accessibility in Mind (WebAIM) that provides visual feedback about the accessibility of your web content by injecting icons and indicators into your page.  All analysis is done entirely within the browser allowing secure valuation of intranet, local, password protected, and other sensitive web pages.

Note that WAVE is more useful for web developers as opposed to web authors. WAVE displays alerts for back-end coding that web authors cannot address. For web authors, we recommend staying up-to-date on your SiteImprove reports to keep your department webpages accessible.

The directions on this page will guide you through assessing web content using WAVE.

1. Go to the Chrome Web Store.
2. Search and add WAVE Evaluation Tool to your Chrome extensions.
   1. Once it has been added, you can select the WAVE extension in your browser window.

      

3. Go to the website whose accessibility you are trying to determine.
   1. Click the icon to open the WAVE Tool and run the accessibility check.
   2. The WAVE window will open (the left side of the screen) with a summary of the accessibility review. The summary will be shown in a prioritized list with errors, alerts, and structural elements.

      
   3. Click the ‘Details’ icon in the WAVE menu to view the full report. This report provides a list of issues with documentation explaining the need for correction.