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Comment by prezjordan | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN!

I built this utility with the help of two colleagues[0][1] after working on accessibility at Khan Academy for a few weeks, and seeing first-hand the process of evangelizing accessibility on a dev team. Our automated tests were far from approachable (and became more annoying than helpful), so we built tota11y to make the manual testing experience more interactive and educational (we like teaching things).

I touch on this in our engineering blog [2]

Anyway, super thrilled to see tota11y near the top of HN this morning, and happy to answer any questions you may have.

[0]: https://twitter.com/himichelletodd

[1]: https://twitter.com/rileyjshaw

[2]: http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/tota11y.htm

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This project arrived at the right time. We're adding accessibility insight & debugging tools like this directly into the Chrome DevTools and the lead developer of the Chrome Accessibility Developer Tools extension is leading the effort. Our mocks actually look quite similar to what you have here and I'll definitely ping you separately to get feedback on what the browser can do to help. Thanks

Hey Paul,

Love the work Alice & co are doing. We're big users of Accessibility Developer Tools (https://github.com/GoogleChrome/accessibility-developer-tool...) at Khan Academy both as part of our automated testing process and now as part of tota11y.

Really excited to see it to make its way into DevTools proper! Been rocking the extension for a few months now.

Nice, what would be cool is to have something like this online (as a service), that could fetch a page and make a report.

The report could then be shared with web designers who use an insufficient contrast ratio between their background and their text for instance, no need to be visually impaired to be bothered by sites who do that kind of stuff, and they are way too many.

WAVE[1] at WebAIM will do this for you. It was built by a non-profit dedicated to online accessibility. Just type in an address and go. They also have a Chrome plugin [2] that runs the same accessibility checks in your browser and produces a report. I found it very helpful on a recent accessibility project. Nice to see more developers caring about this.

[1] http://wave.webaim.org/

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wave-evaluation-to...

Nibbler[0] and pa11y[1] will handle that use-case for you. I've only used either a little. I really like the idea of catering these reports to designers, though!

[0]: http://nibbler.silktide.com/

[1]: http://pa11y.org/

Awesome tool, thank you for making this available to the community! I'm going to take a crack at integrating this into our ember application and (hopefully) cut back on some of the support. Is there any formal ember-cli support in the works?

Nope no formal support. I'm not terribly familiar with ember-cli, but I'd love to hear how we can make it easier to use tota11y with any codebase.

Great job, love it! It would be really cool if you had a toggle for implementing the suggestions, so you could instantly see if a suggested change looks better.

Thanks :) We've got an issue open for this - https://github.com/Khan/tota11y/issues/21, so hopefully coming soon.

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