Show HN: MAWD – Simple web accessibility testing for developers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: MAWD – Simple web accessibility testing for developers

myaccessible.website

29 pointsfionatg13 comments

Thumbs up for making the web more accessible! I was fortunate to work on a project with a WCAG AA requirement for the last 1.5 years, so I can only imagine how overwhelming is must be for people outside this area to make their sites accessible.

> MAWD is designed to pick up 100% of the issues with a site, but she needs your help to do it.

> 4 WCAG criteria fully tested. 22 different tests

There are 4 WCAG principles with 12-13 guidlines, each having at least one success criteria. There are about 60 success criteria, so 22 different tests are far from 100%. I've also encountered many subjective decisions and screen reader quirks. It's probably much better than fully-automated tools (like pa11y or axe), but it still takes a lot of experience to find and fix all accessibility issues. I suggest lowering the "100%" claim.

This is a very spammy comment, but if anyone is interested but it's not a good time to sign up, you can sign up to my (totally not spammy) mailing list and get an accessibility poster as a bonus: https://myaccessible.website/subscribe

This link should be somewhere on the page - I didn't want to sign up to a beta but wanted to be notified about updates and couldn't see where to.

Thank you - I will add this in.

It'd be useful to see a sample report before signing up. It doesn't have to be a form where I put my own site URL in, it can be some representative examples, but just so I know what I'm buying into. The wall of text is fine – it gives plenty of information – but proof's in the pudding.

Thanks for the feedback! I'll work on getting this added to the page, I understand where you're coming from there

This website has a section with good (and free) tools for accessibility: https://progressivetooling.com

I just received this email from you:

>I’m going to send you a few emails over the next couple of weeks to give you some hints and tips.

Yeah, so I just marked your email address as spam. I never subscribed for any newsletter and there isn't any unsubscribe button either in your mail nor your website. Just stop.

The robot image on the home page doesn't have any alt text. Not a good start for an accessibility checking service.

The image is basically there to be decorative. In that scenario, an empty alt attribute is used to inform assistive technology that yes, there is an image here, but it isn't adding any further information. It's actually one of the main things that MAWD helps with right now.

Putting alt text on all the images of random cats on a website only adds value to people if the cats are at all relevant to the content :)

https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/NOTE-WCAG20-TECHS-20161007/H67

Wouldn't adding role="presentation" be good for an image that is purely for decoration?

Does it work for web applications having most of their content behind an auth wall?

Yes, because it captures the data using a Chrome Extension. You have to navigate to the page and use the extension to capture the data. This means it works on sites that aren't even on the public internet, localhost, you name it.

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