• Search Engine Journal , Wednesday, September 10, 2008 1:15 PM

Ann Smarty serves up another robust review of essential SEO tools--this time, focusing on applications that let Webmasters assess the usability of their sites. There are general page viewers and accessibility checkers like Wave, which shows features and red flags possible problems in graphical format; while Lynx viewer shows a text-only version of a page to ensure that it functions even if users turn off scripts like Java and CSS.

You can use Image Analyser and Alt Text Checker to test whether your images have alt tags and are set at the right values, and there are also tools to check the colors of your site. ColorFilter, for example, will show you how your pages looks to someone who's colorblind, while Color Contrast analyzes a page's internal and external CSS to test the contrast and brightness between the text and the background. And Color Contrast's assessment is based on W3C accessibility standards.

Smarty also lists a bunch of Firefox extensions like Web Developer, which lets you disable all scripts, and Fangs, which simulates what a page will look like through a screen reader.

Read the whole story at Search Engine Journal »