Accessibility Checker

Automatic check

When site owners are editing content, the Editoria11y accessibility checker automatically highlights items that may present an accessibility issue.

On each page, a toggle in the bottom right corner will activate and indicate a count if potential issues are found.

Clicking the toggle opens a panel with more details, highlighting the items on the page that need review.

The panel may also open automatically just after a page is created or edited (if the issue count changed when the page was saved).

Clicking the toggle again closes the panel and removes all the highlights.

Issue highlighter

Tooltip reads: Manual check: is the link meaningful and concise?

Built-in tools

Tabs on the main panel offer visualizations of the page's text alternatives for images ("alts") and heading outline.

Alt Text

Alt text panel showing alt text next to images

Header outline

outline tab showing outline of the current page

Site-wide reports

From the site's administrative toolbar, the "Content accessibility" report shows any detected issues. Previously dismissed alerts can be reviewed and restored.

Issue and dismissal lists can also be exported to CSV for further analysis.

Reports page showing pages with the most issues and the most frequent issues

Tests

Editoria11y's automatic tests focus on issues that it can be confident need addressing, such as images that are missing alternative text.

The "full check" focuses on flagging things that need manual review, such as links to PDF documents that may or may not be tagged.

Quick check tests

  • Document outline
    • Skipped heading levels
    • Empty headings
    • Very long headings
  • Text alternatives
    • Images with no alt text
    • Images with a filename as alt text
    • Images with very long alt text
    • Alt text that contains redundant text like “image of” or “photo of”
    • Images in links with alt text that appears to be describing the image instead of the link destination
    • Embedded visualizations that usually require a text alternative (e.g. Tableau, Google Data Studio)
  • Meaningful links
    • Links with no text
    • Links titled with a filename
    • Links only titled with only generic text: “click here,” “learn more,” “download,” etc.
    • Links that open in a new window without an external link icon
  • Making sure list formatting is used rather than asterisks, numbers and letters
  • LARGE QUANTITIES OF CAPS LOCK TEXT
  • Tables without headers and tables with document headers ("Header 3") instead of table headers (<th>)

Full check tests

  • The first link to a PDF on a page, reminding the user to provide an accessible PDF or an alternate format
  • Suspiciously short blockquotes that may not be block quotes.
  • Embedded videos, reminding the user to add closed captions
  • Embedded audio, reminding the user to provide a transcript
  • Embedded social media, reminding the user to check their social media content as well

Things Editoria11y can't check

Some things just need some old-fashioned proofreading. Common content issues that need manual review:

  • Avoid using images of text, as they scale poorly for mobile devices and screen magnifiers.
  • Color contrast needs to be strong enough for users with low vision or colorblindness, and you should avoid using color alone to provide meaning, especially in charts and graphs.
  • You should identify languages other than English for screen readers: The word "Español" without a language tag will be pronounced by a screen reader as "A Spaniel."
  • Avoid using sensory characteristics that disappear with layout or color perception changes. The sentence "the red items in the right-hand column are required" loses meaning if the user is hearing the content read to them, or the content has reflowed to a single column on a mobile device.

Questions & feedback

If you do not see the checker when you are logged in, need help fixing anything Editoria11y finds, or find it is flagging things that are not actually issues, please contact [email protected].