Readability

The most fundamental aspect of your content’s accessibility is how easy it is to understand. This starts with the text of your page, post, or document. Keeping to a roughly grade 8 readability level is recommended for content targeting the general public.

  • Hemingway Editor is our preferred tool. Paste in your text and the website highlights areas for improvement with explanations of the issues it finds. Both a free and a paid version is available.

  • Grammarly started as a better spell checker and has now become a robust writing tool with suggestions for improving your writing that generally make your content more accessible.

  • WebFX Readability Test allows you to paste in text or scan a whole webpage. The results don’t offer simple-to-follow recommendations like Hemingway but do offer multiple scores, if you’re into that sort of thing.

  • Scolarius is also not particularly focused on recommendations for improvement on a sentence-by-sentence basis but it’s a tool specifically designed for testing French-language text.

Text line width

Along with ensuring that your content is easy to understand, it’s also important to make it easy to read. To do this, content shouldn’t be wider than 75 characters nor shorter than 45 characters per line (including spaces). You can probably push this to 80 characters, but beyond that, text becomes harder to read. That’s because it takes more effort to find your place in that text when you finish reading one line and start looking for the beginning of the next line.

Since many modern Content Management Systems (CMSs) tend to offer multiple content block widths that you can toggle between, the following tools will help you to make choices for body text like paragraphs and lists that keep your content width reasonable. For all of these tools, we recommend considering your content as viewed on the widest device as this will likely give you the widest line width. This is likely to be on a large external monitor rather than, for example, a smaller laptop or mobile device.

  • Character Counter Online is a no-thrills tool where you can paste in a single line of text to see how long it is.

  • 45-75 character highlighting bookmarklet allows you to click on the text directly in your browser to get a visual representation of the ideal line width. Ideal for using with front-end previews of content you’re working on or already published content.

Colour contrast

No roundup of accessibility tools would be complete without contrast checkers. To be considered sufficiently accessible, the contrast between text and images of text (or graphics that need to be legible) need to have at least a 4.5:1 contrast with their background. Ideally, that contrast should be 7:1. Which is to say that text should be seven times brighter than its background.

Hopefully, your brand guidelines document already lets you know which colour combinations are accessible for your brand palette but you might be working on things like social media content, graphics, charts and more where these tools will help with making decisions that ensure these media types are inclusive.

Checkers for multiple colours against each other

Checkers with adjustment controls

  • WebAIM’s Contrast Checker is great if you have just a few colour options and are not looking for much in the way of adjusting those colours. You can change colour lightness and opacity, that’s it.

  • Colour contrast checker is a step up with both HSL and RGB controls – great if you don’t have a set colour palette.

Checkers with improvement suggestions

  • Tanaguru Contrast Finder kicks things up a notch by giving you the option to find either relatively close alternatives that offer sufficient contrast or a wide range of options unrelated to your original inputs.

  • Coolors Color Contrast Checker doesn’t offer as wide of an array of options but is a great tool if you’re want to end up with optimized colour combinations without decision fatigue.

Colour blindness simulators

  • Toptal Colorblind Web Page Filter allows you to see any web page side-by-side with what it looks like to someone with one of multiple kinds of colourblindness.

  • Coblis Color Blindness Simulator is a great alternative for testing images specifically because it allows you to upload your image and see how it will appear based on different kinds of colourblindness.

Image alt text

This is one that often gets confusing but is also relevant to most web pages you’re working on. Whenever you upload a new image to your CMS or use one that’s already in your media library, you have some decisions to make about providing a description of the image when displaying it on any page that will be available to visitors who are using, for example, a screenreader to interact with your website.

You’ve probably seen social media posts that include image descriptions (especially on Instagram), so the tools listed here have application well beyond your own website.

Accessibility checkers

If you’re working with existing content, it could be helpful to employ an accessibility checker that will highlight all issues it finds on the entire page or post in question. Once again, the caveat here is that 100% accessibility is highly unlikely to be reached with an automated tool but it’s a great start!

Another caveat worth mentioning here is that a lot of these tools are geared towards developers so they might be overkill for content management use but Editoria11y is great if you’re working with a WordPress website.

  • WAVE from WebAIM is a tried and true accessibility review tool where you can paste in any web page to be tested or install a browser extension to do the same.

  • axe from deque is another trusted tool with web browser extensions.

  • Editoria11y Accessibility Checker is a fantastic WordPress plugin that works with the block editor and can be accessed from the front-end of your website. This is the most use-friendly option.

  • Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker is another WordPress plugin that has a free and paid version with a variety of options and a great team behind it.

Your turn

With all of these tools at your fingertips, creating accessible content can be a downright pleasant experience. Especially if you get a sense of satisfaction from inclusion and equity driven content creation. You can test them out as you work on new content or put them to use for improving existing pages and posts on your website.

We recommend starting with one area of improvements and finding the tool (or tools) that work best for you, for example, readability. Then adding another area of improvements, like image alt text. Building your toolset this way will help to avoid overwhelm and build strong foundations within each area of your content management process.

Accessibility guides & help

We’ve created a series of guides to help you create content that’s optimized for varied and wide audiences:

Of course, if you’d like a bit of help, we offer accessibility auditing, training, and on-going support services.

Reach out to us