Accessibility testing on a budget
Delorie Lynx Viewer
If you were to approach the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) for an audit of your web site, the first thing you should do is check how your site looks in Lynx - a text-only browser - because this is precisely what they will do.
Lynx does laughably little:
- it does not display images
- it does not run <script>ed content
- it cannot use image maps
- it cannot display tables, but will instead linearise them
It doesn't do much, does it? But for a blind user, none of the above matters. So, you need to be sure that your site works at this most basic level.
Lynx is not an easy program to install or use, however, so the most simple way to find out how your pages look is to visit Delorie's Lynx viewer. You simply type in the URL, press the button and hey presto - your page appears in text form.