A new tool to improve website accessibility

December 14, 2017

Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/) have recently released tota11y, a javascript plugin to provide visual feedback on the accessibility of website-in-development. They describe it as follows:

Accessibility is hard for many reasons. While current tooling provides mechanisms for detecting most accessibility violations, there remains a certain amount of disconnect between the developer and the problems they are causing. Most of these errors are things we can’t see, things that won’t affect us, and things without a perfect, exact fix.

tota11y aims to solve these problems by providing a fun, interactive way to see accessibility issues. Not only should the web be fully accessible to all, but developers should feel empowered to fix and prevent accessibility violations from happening in the first place.

Accessibility is an ongoing issue for anyone involved in creating websites; although it’s been noted that paying better attention to accessibility will actually improve SEO results, as the needs of those visitors with accessibility issues tend to also be the needs that Search Engine indexing robots look for in ranking a website. Further information about accessibility can be found in a number of sites.

Obviously, this plugin should be removed once the site goes live – unless you want visitors to marvel at how accessible your site is.

tota11y is available here: http://khan.github.io/tota11y/

Note: the term “a11y” is short form for accessibility, literally a – 11 letters removed – y: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_accessibility