Useful links
One of our goals is to help you to help yourself. The more educated you are in usability, the better we’ve done our job. Below are General Links, Tools and Downloads that we find helpful.
Usability tools
The following sites provide ways to help you test the usability and accessibility of your site. We use them regularly. A lot of them are free, or provide trial versions, so they will get you off to a good start in uncovering usability issues.
Assessment Tools
- A-Prompt “A-Prompt (Accessibility Prompt) is a software tool designed to improve the usability of HTML documents by evaluating Web pages for accessibility barriers and then providing developers with a fast and easy way to make the necessary repairs.”
- Web Accessibility Toolbar This free toolbar from the Accessible Information Solutions (AIS) team at Vision Australia is simply brilliant. It allows you to perform a large number of accessibility checks with the click of a button. Highly recommended.
- Lift Online From UsableNet, helps to automate the process of checking and solving accessibility issues.
Other Tools
- IBM’s Homepage Reader Tool for visually-impaired people that reads web pages aloud. If you don’t want to download the full reader, you can hear a screenreader simulation instead.
- Gunning Fog Measurement Tool A tool that allows you to measure the readability of a site. It proves that techniques invented in the 60s can still have real relevance to today’s web.
Checklists
- Ten Usability Heuristics Probably the most well-known list of web guidelines, from Jakob Nielsen.
- Usability.gov This site has a very useful list of research-based design and usability guidelines.