Browser extensions are add-ons to your Internet browser that let you personalize how it works and add custom features. Many common browsers, like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, are well-known for their extensive library of browser extensions.
Among these are extensions that can check the accessibility of your website. It sounds simple — just install the extension and find out if you’re compliant with WCAG standards. But are these extensions as reliable as they claim to be? Let’s take a closer look and see what we can expect when using a browser extension to check the accessibility of a website.
Background
Accessibility checker extensions should not be your only stop on the road to website accessibility. They should only be used as one of the many tools in your arsenal in building an accessible website, a supplement to inclusive designing, testing, and getting the entire team invested.
These extensions are available on many browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and others. If your browser supports extensions, there is likely an extension that claims to check accessibility reliably. Not all are created equal, however, and some come with their share of issues. Google Developer, for example, often only picks up 17% of known issues.
There are a lot of pros and cons to consider when deciding whether to use an accessibility checker extension.
Pros
Perhaps the biggest pro of accessibility checker extensions is the fact that they are, at the very least, a starting point. When coupled with other tools, they can be very effective at giving you a basic understanding of where the major accessibility errors are on your website. It’s also possible to use more than one extension — layering can give you double the coverage and help fill in the gaps that might exist if you only used one.
The Web Accessibility Initiative recommends automated audits, or checks, of your website. Using a browser extension can be one of these checks. It also provides a glimpse into where your website is with accessibility in real-time while it’s live, which may yield different results than a pre-launch test. That’s highly valuable, especially with the constantly-changing nature of the Internet.
The Bureau of Internet Accessibility incorporates automated testing into its four-point hybrid testing model. They acknowledge that, while automated checks can miss a lot of things that human eyes catch, they are not without value. They can provide insight into deeper issues, saving a lot of valuable time — and money — in the process.
Browser extensions are also often free and easy to use. You can run these checks with a click of a button and get your results almost instantly — no wait time, no stress. That’s a huge benefit, especially if you need answers quickly. Browser extensions can give you that.
Cons
Automated checks, like those from accessibility checker extensions, are not performed by humans. So there’s a high likelihood that they might miss something that a human wouldn’t. The missing “human element” is a big deal, especially in the testing phase of accessibility, and an automated extension can’t replace that. Computers just can’t replicate human judgment to determine whether an aspect of a website passes or fails WCAG requirements.
Automation may deliver false passes and failures. For example, the AI may be able to determine if captions are present in a video, but not if they’re accurate. So it might approve a video that has captions that do not meet WCAG standards. Likewise, it might fail an image based on its color because it can’t discern that it’s a logo and recognize that it’s the exception to the WCAG rule.
There’s also a significant quality disparity between these browser extensions. Like the App stores of smartphones, it’s relatively easy to publish an extension and make it available for others to use, which means extensions aren’t always vetted. If you don’t do your research, you could end up using a poorly-developed extension, which could cause more problems than it solves.
People might get caught up in the “free-and-simple” nature of automated tools and forget that making your website accessible will always take hard work.
Conclusion
Accessibility checker browser extensions can help identify some of the problems you need to fix on your website to be truly accessible. But do not rely on these automated checks alone — they are a mixed bag of reliability. Always have a human double-check the accessibility of your site as you strive to remain WCAG compliant.
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