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Product/License Description
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We use it to check whether all information on a Web page can be accessed and read correctly by a screen reader.
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InFocus™
By SSB Technologies, Inc.
http://www.ssbtechnologies.com
A commercial product
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The best tool nowadays to check for 508 compliance. It can spider the whole Web site or directory of files, has convenient user interface and report generation. The product is developed in Java and available for different platforms. Some drawbacks include a possible problem with installation (easily resolved), complex pages are parsed too long (overcome by use of more powerful hardware), and some other insignificant bugs.
We use it to check for 508 violations in resulting HTML code.
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Bobby
By CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology)
http://www.cast.org/Bobby/
Earlier Bobby was available for free download and evaluation. Now it is a commercial product.
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Bobby checks for compliance with WAI Recommendations, including "A", "AA" and "AAA" levels of conformance. It was not designed to check for 508 compliance but still can be used for this as an additional verification tool. It’s developed in Java and available for different platforms. Some drawbacks are: some pages cannot be parsed; behavior of Bobby depends on Java virtual machine used. Bobby is a must-have tool for verification with accessibility standards.
We use it to check for WAI compliance.
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Lynx
http://lynx.browser.org/
Available for free
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Lynx is a text mode Web browser that supports many modern HTML features. It’s available for a wide range of platforms, including DOS, Windows, different flavors of UNIX and Linux. Lynx is a very handy tool but it does not support JavaScript. It’s a serious limitation as many modern Web sites and applications extensively use client-side scripting. There are other text-mode browsers that support JavaScript, but they are not so popular.
We use it to check the functionality of simple Web sites in a text mode.
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VisCheck
http://www.vischeck.com/
Available for free
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VisCheck simulates colorblind vision showing you how Web pages will look like to someone who is colorblind. It is developed in Java. There is also a plug-in for Adobe® Photoshop® to check images. The tool does its job very well.
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JAWS®
By Freedom Scientific, Inc.
http://www.freedomscientific.com/
A commercial product
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JAWS® is an advanced screen reader that supports Internet Explorer with special features like link lists, frame lists, form mode, HTML tables, graphic labels and others.
We use it to check whether all information on a Web page can be accessed and read correctly by a screen reader.
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Direct Source™
By Intetics Co./Web Space Station®
http://508.WebSpaceStation.com
There will be a commercial version of this software soon.
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Direct Source™ scans a directory tree and finds accessibility violations directly in the source code, not in the resulting HTML code as other tools do. Such method allows to speed up the process of retrofitting. The software is developed in Perl and C/C++. It supports and fixes violations in Web applications written in Perl, Java/JSP, C/C++, Python, PHP, and ASP. The drawback is that at the moment this software is a set of custom-tailored scripts.
We use it at the beginning of the retrofitting to quickly find and fix most of the violations directly in the source code.
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