Website accessibility is a serious topic for all web developers these days, and if it isn’t, it should be. Making a website that is accessible is not that hard, but it does require you to think from a UI point of view instead of a pure coding thought process. One tool that is freely available for you to download is NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA). The website describes it as this:

“Providing feedback via synthetic speech and Braille, it enables blind or vision impaired people to access computers running Windows for no more cost than a sighted person”

This tool can help you diagnose accessibility issues your website may have for blind or vision impaired users. It can help you diagnose input fields that can’t be read, missing alternate text for images and a bunch of other things. You can download this great piece of free software from here.

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I have seen a very common question in the forums – How can I create PDF documents from my .NET application?

Here are some of the OpenSouce and Paid libraries that allow you to do so:

Open Source

PDFSharp – PDFsharp is the Open Source library that easily creates PDF documents from any .NET language

iTextSharp – Library to create/manipulate PDF documents on-the-fly

Report.NET – generate PDF documents in a simple and flexible manner

PDFjet for .NET – royalty-free PDF library

Paid Libraries

PDF4NET – .NET library for adding PDF capabilities your .NET application

ABCpdf – Dynamically create Adobe PDF documents on the fly

DynamicPDF™ Generator for .NET – real-time creation of PDF documents based on dynamic data

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Broken links or a 404 error is a webmaster’s nightmare. The task of detecting linkrots becomes even more challenging when the website is huge. Here are 4 tools that can make this task easier for you, by detecting Broken Links in your Site.

W3C Link Checker – Checks and detects issues in links, anchors and referenced objects in Web pages or full Web sites. Enter the url or webpage address you want to check and click on the ‘Check’ Button. The tool takes sometime to analyze and detect the broken links. There are various other options given in the screenshot below that can be selected while checking links.

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Xenu’s Link Slueth – Is a very popular desktop program that checks your websites for broken hyperlinks, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets.

Link Checker FireFox AddOn – Check the validity of links on any webpage. Once you have installed this Addon in FireFox, choose ‘Check Page Links’ in the ‘Tools’ menu or right-click on any webpage using FireFox, to invoke this tool.

Dead-Link-Checker – A simple web tool that requires JavaScript enabled to detect broken links

Other Link Checkers – http://linkchecker.sourceforge.net/other.html

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