I think we are all aware we as developers are responsible for making the web more accessible.
With accessibility, we mean making websites that are designed and coded so people with disabilities can use them.
I, for one, never know how to start?
I keep hearing people shout, "MAKE YOUR WEBSITE ACCESSIBLE".
Ok, but how?
These 5 Chrome dev tools will help us with that.
Opening Chrome dev tools
We are using Chrome dev tools for all the below five items, which can be found using the following shortcuts.
Mac Cmd + Shift + C or Windows: Ctrl + Shift + C.
1. Accessibility inspector
The first and perhaps most obvious one is the accessibility inspector.
This will show us mainly the ARIA properties of certain DOM elements.
To access this menu, we need to open Chrome dev tools and right-click an element. It's under the inspect tab but can be hidden under the extra options.
If you want to learn more about creating good aria labels, look at this article on ARIA.
2. Vision emulator
Did you know we can emulate vision deficiencies?
You want to use this function to make sure people with vision deficiencies correctly see your website.
It might be that people with a certain vision disability.
Open up the Chrome dev tools.
Then we click more tools and choose, Rendering.
Scroll down to the bottom on the rendering tab and find "Emulate vision deficiencies".
We can filter on the following:
- Blurred vision (People who can't see sharp)
- Protanopia (Color-blind, shades of red/greens)
- Deuteranopia (Color-blind, green blind)
- Tritanopia (Color-blind, blue, yellow shades)
- Achromatopsia (Total color blind)
This will look as follows:
Note the image below shows a blurred vision image!
3. Lighthouse
Obviously, we have Lighthouse, which nowadays has a whole accessibility tab build in.
Open Chrome dev tools and click on the Lighthouse tab.
We can then check the accessibility checkbox.
We then get a report like this.
It checks on things such as:
- Aria definitions
- Role attributes
- Contrast ratios
- Lang attribute on HTML
- Tabindex on forms
- Alt elements
- And many more!
4. Contrast ratio
A big thing when it comes to accessibility is contrast. We also saw this in our vision deficiency item.
Chrome has a quick way to show contrast in a certain element.
To open the Contrast ratio, we need to open Chrome dev tools.
Then inspect a text element and find a color box.
Click the little color box and choose the pointer element.
You might think ok, but what does this mean?
- The first value is your current contrast ratio
- The second value is the minimum contrast ratio (AA)
- The last one is the enhanced contrast ratio (AAA)
You can change the colour and see if you can enhance your contrasts.
5. Inspect element tooltip
Another great tooltip which combines many of the above is actually the inspector tooltip.
We can use the inspector tooltip by opening Dev tools and selecting the pointer icon.
Then we can hover an element and see with one quick glimpse what the contrast is the role, and if it's focusable by the keyboard.
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Top comments (15)
Thanks for the article Chris, has a good variety of options.
I have a question about Lighthouse (i didn't used for now). That tool covers the majority of accesibility variables to look at glance or is a better idea combine it with other tools to have a better coverage?
Lighthouse is a good starting point, yes, but it's thresholds are lower than the individual ones.
So if a11y is your main goal it's best to also keep checking the individual options.
Nice!
Thank you!
no problem!
Really nice post, Bongers! It is too useful. I have used them already and really working good.
Nice! glad to see people putting them to good use.
Thank you for this article Chris! We should all be more mindful towards accessibility when building web pages and it's great to have these tools at hand
Yes, it's so amazing to see a big player like Google push us to become better.
You can see your pagespeed score will downgrade if your not doing a11y well.
There's something very similar in Firefox under the dedicated "accessibility" tab.
Oh nice, didn't know about that one!
Thank you for this list! I didn't know about the vision emulator, seems like a really cool tool - definitely need to try it out.
Definitely! It makes me realize some of my images are really bad for some colorblindness
Oh wow great article as well!
I think it's fairly new, only found it myself 2 weeks ago