
Show HN: MAWD – Simple web accessibility testing for developers - fionatg
https://myaccessible.website/detective
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darekkay
Thumbs up for making the web more accessible! I was fortunate to work on a
project with a WCAG AA requirement for the last 1.5 years, so I can only
imagine how overwhelming is must be for people outside this area to make their
sites accessible.

> MAWD is designed to pick up 100% of the issues with a site, but she needs
> your help to do it.

> 4 WCAG criteria fully tested. 22 different tests

There are 4 WCAG _principles_ with 12-13 guidlines, each having at least one
success criteria. There are about 60 success criteria, so 22 different tests
are far from 100%. I've also encountered many subjective decisions and screen
reader quirks. It's probably much better than fully-automated tools (like
pa11y or axe), but it still takes a lot of experience to find and fix all
accessibility issues. I suggest lowering the "100%" claim.

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fionatg
This is a very spammy comment, but if anyone is interested but it's not a good
time to sign up, you can sign up to my (totally not spammy) mailing list and
get an accessibility poster as a bonus:
[https://myaccessible.website/subscribe](https://myaccessible.website/subscribe)

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frereubu
This link should be somewhere on the page - I didn't want to sign up to a beta
but wanted to be notified about updates and couldn't see where to.

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fionatg
Thank you - I will add this in.

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mstade
It'd be useful to see a sample report before signing up. It doesn't have to be
a form where I put my own site URL in, it can be some representative examples,
but just so I know what I'm buying into. The wall of text is fine – it gives
plenty of information – but proof's in the pudding.

~~~
fionatg
Thanks for the feedback! I'll work on getting this added to the page, I
understand where you're coming from there

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Zealotux
This website has a section with good (and free) tools for accessibility:
[https://progressivetooling.com](https://progressivetooling.com)

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zichy
I just received this email from you:

>I’m going to send you a few emails over the next couple of weeks to give you
some hints and tips.

Yeah, so I just marked your email address as spam. I never subscribed for any
newsletter and there isn't any unsubscribe button either in your mail nor your
website. Just stop.

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onion2k
The robot image on the home page doesn't have any alt text. Not a good start
for an accessibility checking service.

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fionatg
The image is basically there to be decorative. In that scenario, an empty alt
attribute is used to inform assistive technology that yes, there is an image
here, but it isn't adding any further information. It's actually one of the
main things that MAWD helps with right now.

Putting alt text on all the images of random cats on a website only adds value
to people if the cats are at all relevant to the content :)

[https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/NOTE-
WCAG20-TECHS-20161007/H67](https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/NOTE-
WCAG20-TECHS-20161007/H67)

~~~
majora2007
Wouldn't adding role="presentation" be good for an image that is purely for
decoration?

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nicolaslem
Does it work for web applications having most of their content behind an auth
wall?

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fionatg
Yes, because it captures the data using a Chrome Extension. You have to
navigate to the page and use the extension to capture the data. This means it
works on sites that aren't even on the public internet, localhost, you name
it.

