Google Chrome can now show devs how their sites look to users with visual impairments

Google’s popular Chrome browser has launched a new tool to help developers tune their websites for different visual deficiencies such as color blindness and blurred vision.

Mathias Bynes, a Google employee working on developer tools for Chrome, tweeted a demo video showing how you can test your website for various paucities.

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Developers can find this new section through Developer tools > More tools > Rendering > Emulate visual deficiencies, and see how their website looks for people with different impairments. Then they can make the change to the code to render the site correctly for people with these deficiencies.

New accessibility feature in @ChromeDevTools: simulate vision deficiencies, including blurred vision & various types of color blindness. ?

Find out how people with vision deficiencies experience your web app, and resolve contrast issues you didn’t even know you had! pic.twitter.com/QKLQmEhhMM

— Mathias Bynens (@mathias) March 10, 2020

In 2018, Mozilla introduced the accessibility inspector tool in the developer version Firefox 61, to let devs test their site for accessibility. Last year, it added new tools such as contrast checker and color vision deficiency simulator to Firefox 70.

Last November, Accessibe.com, a company that provides tools to make websites more accessible, published a study that said more than 98% of 10 million webpages it studied failed to comply with Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. 

While Chrome’s new tool is not a solution to every accessibility problem faced by websites, it’s a step in the right direction.