I’m not sure if I’ve ever been more excited in my professional life than I am right now…
We started Squidler with an idea and a goal to democratize website testing and quality. Today, we are proud to take the next step in this mission – we are making website accessibility testing more available than ever!
Since yesterday, we have been testing all our customers’ websites for all rules that make up the WCAG standard, and subsequently what’s needed to meet ADA in the US. But I’m getting ahead of myself – what am I really talking about, why should you care, and what can it mean for the digital landscape?
On Sunday the 3rd it’s International Day of Disabled Persons and for people in the digital space, it is a time to think about accessibility and what it really means. At its core, I think website accessibility is about the ethical aspects of making online information and services truly available for everyone. It is simply the right thing to do.
Even though the base motivation for accessibility is ethical, there is fundamental business logic in enabling your website for everyone regardless of disabilities. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over a billion people, approximately 15% of the world’s population, experience some form of disability. Adding to this the fact that websites which follow the WCAG standard are more accessible to aging people experiencing declining eyesight, people with temporary injuries, and people accessing a website in limiting or challenging environments. Simply put – if your website is more accessible, more potential customers will be able to interact with your business.
On top of the ethical and business logic connected to enabling your website for people with disabilities, there is current and coming legislation across the globe connected to this topic. The Americans with Disabilities Act, ADA, is one example, and the European Accessibility Act (EAA) is another which is already in play for all public organizations in the EU. EAA will also go into full effect for all services and products covered by the directive during 2025, including private businesses such as e-commerce websites as well.
Since day one, Squidler has been focused on finding quality issues on websites by autonomously navigating the site much like a human would. Squidler clicks links, interacts with components, scrolls, and uses your website all the while validating for a plethora of different functional problems. This capability is something that we have married with the open-source accessibility test library “axe-core” which checks for compliance with various versions of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0, 2.1), Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, and other international standards of web accessibility.
Even though Squidler tests and validates your website against the WCAG and more, we do not provide any type of accessibility certification. However, I would go out on a limb and say that if we can’t find any accessibility problems on your site, your level of accessibility is good. That being said, we of course acknowledge the value and need of actual human testing to capture the nuances and subject experience of a real visitor.
“axe-core” is a widely used test library for validating accessibility, but it is generally used in complex development environments. Through Squidler, “axe-core” is available automatically, even autonomously, for everyone without any added complexity or manual work. The testing is obviously limited to what is publicly available on your website, but since Squidler interacts with your website like a user, even dynamically loaded content will be tested. Together with our Functional Test Suite, Squidler essentially provides a good quality baseline for your website.
While we are adding accessibility validation to Squidler, we still maintain the same subscription cost of 49€ per month for all our customers. We won’t push notifications to you every time we find an accessibility problem, like we do with functional problems we find, but everything we find will be immediately available in your Squidler feed and sent to you as a part of the weekly summary.
We hope and believe that the ease, simplicity, and affordability that we offer around website accessibility testing can move the needle and help out in making online information and services truly available for everyone. At the end of the day, democratizing accessibility is the right thing to do.
Do you know if your website is accessible? Test it right now! All you have to do is enter your URL in the input field below and press “Test it”.