WebAIM WAVE

WebAIM’s Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool, which marks up a page with the accessibility errors and warnings it finds. As a browser extension it checks the page the browser has already rendered, so it works where hosted services like Sauce Labs and BrowserStack cannot reach.

WAVE, from WebAIM, is my go-to accessibility checker, and I reach for it constantly in my current role at UW-Milwaukee. I keep the browser extension installed in Vivaldi, and because it runs in the browser rather than as a web service, it can test pages that are not publicly accessible.

Used at

UW-Milwaukee

Official website

wave.webaim.org

Age

25 years (since 2001)

Projects using it

jws.dev

Experience highlights

• Check staging sites, intranet pages, and anything behind a login, which a hosted checker cannot reach.
• Find missing alternative text, contrast failures, and structural problems on the page as the browser renders it.