How Accessible is Your New Blog? 5 Tools to Analyze How Accessible Your New Blog Is

How Accessible is Your New Blog? 5 Tools to Analyze How Accessible Your New Blog Is

Accessibility is an often overlooked aspect of blogs and websites. Several factors affect the accessibility of your blog including erroneous code, HTML and CSS validation issues, color contrast and typography issues, and broken links or site elements. Many accessibility issues are detected by browsers and go unnoticed by visitors unless they cause your site to display incorrectly. By making your blog more accessible, you will be able to reach more readers on a wider variety of devices. There are many tools online for checking the accessibility of your blog. These tools can analyze your current posts, theme, and typography to highlight any areas of improvement. Read ahead to find out more about these tools and how to increase the usability and accessibly of your blog.

1. WP Accessibility

A large portion of blogs is hosted on WordPress installations, so it makes sense that a WordPress plugin would be developed to check for blog accessibility issues. WP Accessibility is the perfect plugin to fill this blog development need. This plugin will check your theme and content for issues that may cause bugs or poor usability for visitors. It goes over HTML, CSS, Javascript, and behind the scenes aspects of your blog to make sure browsers can load it properly. This tool will also go a step further and repair issues caused by broken links, empty text strings, and improperly formatted attributes.

2. Color Contrast Analyzer Plugin

This plugin can check your blog for the correct color contrast. It works with the popular design app Sketch and will analyze any color scheme or template. Even if you didn’t create your template using Sketch you can download the image file or even screenshot your blog and open it using Sketch to run it by this handy tool. This tool is free to download and easy to use. This is a great tool for checking the frontend of your blog for accessibility issues that may turn readers off or make your text content hard to see.

3. Wave

Wave is a free online tool for checking blogs and sites for accessibility issues. To use this tool simply paste the URL of your blog in the input box and press enter. This tool will check your site and coding for errors that can hinder usability and make your blog completely inaccessible to certain readers. The Wave tool checks site structure, HTML, images, links, and other aspects of your blog for issues and offers a detailed report so you can correct anything that’s out of place. This is a great tool for those wanting to start a blog with WordPress, as it doesn’t require any additional plugins or downloads to your WordPress installation. This tool should be used by any site or blog owner during the development process and can even be used to check WordPress and Joomla themes that you download from other sources.

4. Accessibly Auditor By Google

This browser extension is a great way to make sure your blog stays error-free and fully accessible while you’re working on it. Developed by Google to help blog and website owners conform to web standards, this free browser add-on will audit any page you visit and report any errors that may affect accessibility. This free tool comes with a sidebar pane element inspector to help you locate the errors in your coding.

5. AChecker

AChecker is a free online tool for checking blogs and other sites for accessibility problems. You can type your blog’s web address into the tool or even upload your HTML files for an instant on-site inspection. This tool is easy to use and will check your html pages one at a time, ensuring a thorough scanning process. This online tool checks your HTML and CSS for validation issues, improper or mistyped tags, and incorrect formatting. It will sort any detection into potential, likely or known problems so that you can focus on the most important issues first.

These tools will check your blog for accessibility to ensure you’re not leaving any readers behind. Some of these tools are plugins that can be installed through your CMS or design software, while others are websites that require no installation. When you are going to start a blog it’s a good idea to keep these tools on hand to make sure you’re using the best accessibility-positive practices for maximum usability and the comfort of your readers.

Maximizing the accessibly of your blog can ensure it looks great on every device across a variety of common user settings. Accessibility issues are commonly found in the HTML and CSS of websites and while they aren’t always detectable by readers, they can raise issues in web browsers on mobile and desktop devices. Making sure you backend code is error free and the frontend of your site looks great with high usability will increase your traffic and keep you on the top of search engine rankings.