It's not free, but I used to use CSE Validator (http://www.htmlvalidator.com/), which did a pretty good job of testing a site.

I guess you already know this, but automatically testing a site to DDA standards is a bit tough though!  First off, it's incredibly hard to automate any accessibility checking (there are a largenumber of manual checks needed), and secondly - the last I knew - nobody really knew what was inside and outside the scope of DDA (best guess was that W3C WAI AA compliant sites would 'pass the test', as it were).  I'm sure someone else can correct/expand on this though...

On 10:57:57 16 May 2007 MattBoseley wrote:

We currently use webxact.watchfire.com which is a decent free tool, but it only tests one page at a time.  Does anyone know of any software or site which will test my whole site for DDA accessibility?

Thanks in advance.

Matthew Boseley

Web Development Manager

www.ecclesiastical.com

On 10:57:57 16 May 2007 MattBoseley wrote:

We currently use webxact.watchfire.com which is a decent free tool, but it only tests one page at a time.  Does anyone know of any software or site which will test my whole site for DDA accessibility?

Thanks in advance.

Matthew Boseley

Web Development Manager

www.ecclesiastical.com

Matthew,

I specialise in web accessibility and as others have mentioned here, for an automated tool I would recommend TAW, the free downloadable version. I use this, but it does only give you very limited information about the accessibility of your site. Automated tools in general are good at pointing out major problems, and also minor ones which are easy enough for a non-human to interpret, but not most of the important stuff e.g. An automated tool will tell you if you have alt attributes for all your images, but won't tell you whether the alt text is a suffficient text equivalent.  In the same way, it won't tell you if the text for links is meaningful enough for someone using screen reader software to navigate easily.

First impressions of your home page look good, and the first thing I tried was to resize the text in internet explorer which worked fine (unlike the vast majority of sites out there which either don't resize at all, or only resize parts of the page and ignore things like navigation and footer information).

The home page claims WAI-AA compliance, which most people in the accessibility industry would probably agree is a good position to be in regarding compliance with the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act. There is nothing hard and fast in there about particular standards but a court would probably look favourably upon that sort of level of compliance as having made "reasonable adjustments". However, I certainly woudln't recommend claiming compliance in this way if you haven't already fully tested the page manually against the guidelines for prioirty levels 1 and 2.

One quick thing that I would point about about the page, many people have difficulty using a mouse so only use a keyboard or other asstive device for navigating the page. It is better if the experience of tabbing through links is the same as hovering over links with a mouse (and this is not difficult to achieve within HTML/CSS code). In the case of this page tabbing through results in a dotted line round the link, whereas mouse hover sometimes results in an underline and sometimes not.

If you would like any more advice or help please feel free to contact me:

Richard Morton

Accessible Web Design, Build, Test and Consultancy

T:0121 308 6289