WAVE is a web accessibility evaluation tool developed by WebAIM.org. It provides visual feedback about the accessibility of your web content by injecting icons and indicators into your page. No automated tool can tell you if your page is accessible, but WAVE facilitates human evaluation and educates about accessibility issues. All analysis is done entirely within the Chrome browser allowing secure valuation of intranet, local, password protected, and other sensitive web pages.
To run a WAVE report, simply click on the WAVE icon to the right of your browser address bar, or select “WAVE this page” from the context menu.
WAVE errors align with WCAG 2.1 failures. The WAVE interface facilitates human evaluation of many other aspects of accessibility and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Section 508 compliance.
Version 3.1.3 (November 2020) includes performance enhancements and fixes several minor bugs, including fixes for multiple alerts for some pseudo-lists and disabled controls being incorrectly flagged for contrast failures.
Version 3.1.2 (October 2020) fixes several minor bugs, including with the Structure tab sometimes incorrectly showing no structure, and improves performance and accessibility testing reliability.
Version 3.1 (September 2020) includes new accessibility tests (region, figure, possible list, select element missing label, and image with title), improved contrast checking, expanded lang attribute value checking, and numerous other bug fixes and improvements.
Version 3.0.9 (July 2020) includes numerous bug fixes, improved accessibility, and improved color contrast checking including fewer false positives and expanded contrast checking for form inputs.
According to https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/contrast-minimum.html , an inactive button has no contrast requirement, but the tool shows a Very Low Contrast error in an inactive button in my Web site. This appears to be an error in this Chrome extension.
This is great, I found it when I was blocked from their website due to limits, I didn’t know this existed Its much faster than using their website.
The only issue I have, which would gain it 5 stars if this was addressed, is when you navigate to a new page or refresh the page the tool is not enabled again, you have to click the plugin icon every time, so it can be annoying. Ideally it should have an enable permanent feature so it will stay active and check pages as you navigate a site or refresh pages. That would be ideal.
Thanks
Room for improvement.
Very annoying that every page that gets validated you have to deselect all of the valid aspects. When this is turned off it should remain off. — We need to know what to fix, not what’s already good.
This app has recently been updated and I have to say that it has brought massive improvements in the UX and performance of the tool. It’s much more impressive than it was a year or so ago, and it has a lot more features packed in.
It’s important to note that genuine accessibility is not just a checkbox- making your site useful without javascript is not a trivial task, and really has to be done with a human touch. However this tool is an excellent first step in pointing out the basics.
Developers note, sometimes things like debug overlays (like django/flask ones) can get warnings flagged and hidden which makes them sometimes hard to find- but there’s nothing this tool can do about that- it’s inspecting the entire window.
Recently I have used many different accessibility checkers, all are useful but many are not efficient to use.
Wave shows me clearly what the issues are, shows me markers visually on my own page and provides a clear description of the issue and what to do about it.
As a fullstack developer, this is the first time that the topic “Accessibility and UIs (React/Spa)” comes into contact. A cover of Specs is to be considered, this Tool makes the entrance into this not quite simple topic for me clearly easier.
My thanks go to the developers, very useful.
Where did the ability to filter down to WCAG AA 2.0 go? What standard is the new redesign using as the “default”?
The new update is really useful. It breaks the page layout less than the old version, explains what’s wrong – WHY it’s important and how to fix it. Thank you.
Something JUST broke the extension, we use it daily at work here, and today I went to use it and its now broken
The update looks so much nicer, good job! I ran into an issue where I needed to test locally and couldn’t use my normal tools, and after finding this Wave plugin I don’t need to any more!
Clunky; and nearly always points out non-issues with very little direction on where they are originating. You would only use this if you are a QA person for basic HTML and you need to get by not knowing any code at all.
This proved to be a very handy tool for assessing web accessibility but I wish I knew to what standard it was being measured… WCAG 2.0? A? AA? If that was added, it would be extremely helpful. Bonus points if we could select the level at which we tested.
Is WAVE up to date with WCAG 2.1?
A lot of false positives.
It is a powerful and useful tool for sure. It takes a little time to figure out the interface and be able to determine what it is telling you. It also slows down the browser quite a bit when it is in use. But again, it is very in depth and beneficial when testing a11y. Give it a try and see if it’s abundant information is worth the learning curve and performance slowdown.
Gives a report but you can’t do anything with the report items. You can click on stuff and maybe it’ll take you to the element it’s referencing but most likely not.
幾つかの「アクセシビリティ・チェックツール」を試しましたが、最も分かりやすくエラーを表示してくれます。(テストするページの画面にエラーやその他のアイコンが表示される。そのアイコンを押すと問題箇所のHTMLが表示される。視覚的に理解しやすい)
ローカル環境でテストできる(テスト環境でテストできる)
HTMLの書き方をもっとシビアにチェックしてくれるともっと使いやすくなる。
Excelente… Gracias
Excelente para evaluar accesibilidad web en línea con el cumplimiento de las pautas WCAG de la W3C, también se puede usar su versión web para el mismo cometido.
This is a great tool. My only suggestion is that you give us a way to download the results. I use this tool for sites that take human interaction to navigate the site where I can’t use my automated tool. I would love to be able to download the results to send to my IT team.
Excelente herramienta
Confusing user interface, and shows some webpages as nothing more than raw HTML when trying to evaluate, even if the page follows W3 spec immaculately.
Diese Erweiterung gehört zum Standardwerkzeug eines jeden Webdevelopers oder Webdesigners.
Prüft und visualisiert technische Umsetzungsfehler in Bezug auf barrierefreie Webseitengestaltung und sensibilisiert auch den in die Jahre gekommen Routineabarbeiter…
Continues to work great when your site was not planned with accessibility in mind. The contrast errors are sometimes off when trying to edit in the tool, but not wrong. Tried aXe extension and it broke this tool. Stay away from aXe. Stick with Wave!!!
It would be great if it could display the webpage as it would actually by understood by a screen reader, for example removing all elements with aria-hidden=”true”. I can only get it to mark them, but that’s not quite the same.