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1 Overview

WAchecker is a Python library serving for automated testing of Web accessibility. It is designed with the goal to provide a free and easily extensible tool, which can be further improved by collaborative approach to its development. As such it is unique among existing Web accessibility testing tools.

WAchecker contains testing infrastructure, miscellaneous utilities, simple CSS2 parser, and set of tests covering Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and U.S. Section 508.

WAchecker is just a library. User interface to Web accessibility testing is provided by another tool, WAassistant, which is a Web application for complex testing of Web accessibility features.

WAchecker is, as well as other common Web accessibility checking tools, just an assistive tool. Not all Web accessibility criteria can be reasonably checked automatically. Many of them require human review. That means WAchecker can detect only a subset of all the possible problems. For the other group of accessibility problems it tries to indicate at least the places where they can occur. For instance, WAchecker can detect whether a Web page contains images and whether they contain alt attributes, but it can't check whether the alternative texts correspond to the contents of the images. It can just present the alternative texts and images to a human reviewer. So you can't expect such tools to perform complete accessibility testing, human review is always needed. The WAassistant application mentioned above can help with the whole review process.