Webalin: Section 508 Compliance Linter¶

Webalin is a Web Accessibility Linter that helps ensure your website is Section 508 compliant. Webalin is written in Python and can be called from the command line or imported for use in your projects test suite.

Author:	Derek Payton
Version:	0.1.0
License:	MIT

A Quick Demo¶

$ webalin http://python.org
E: 94: <input:domains> is missing <label>
E: 95: <input:sitesearch> is missing <label>
E: 96: <input:sourceid> is missing <label>
E: 97: <input:q> is missing <label>
E: 200: <input> is missing [id]

Contents¶

Installation¶

Dependencies¶

Install¶

Use pip to get the latest development version:

pip install -e git+git://github.com/dmpayton/webalin.git

Webalin will be uploaded to PyPI once it is deemed (relatively) stable.

Usage¶

Python Library¶

webalin.analyze can accept a URL or a full HTML document and returns errors as a list:

>>> import webalin
>>> webalin.analyze('https://python.org/')
{'messages': ['E: 94: <input:domains> is missing <label>',
              'E: 95: <input:sitesearch> is missing <label>',
              'E: 96: <input:sourceid> is missing <label>',
              'E: 97: <input:q> is missing <label>',
              'E: 200: <input> is missing [id]'],
 'stats': {'errors': 5, 'warnings': 0}}

>>> webalin.analyze(open('tests/resources/accessible.html', 'r').read())
{'messages': [], 'stats': {'errors': 0, 'warnings': 0}}

Command Line Utility¶

The command line utility accepts arguments from sys.stdin or sys.argv and prints errors to stdout:

$ cat tests/resources/inaccessible.html | ./webalin
E: -: <!DOCTYPE> is missing
E: -: <title> is missing
E: 7: <img:/satic/images/logo.png> is missing [alt]
E: 17: <table> is missing [summary]
E: 19: <th> is missing [scope]
E: 20: <th> is missing [scope]
E: 37: <input:id_username> is missing <label>
E: 41: <input:id_password> is missing <label>
W: 17: <table> contains no <tr> with [scope]

An HTML document that passes all accessibility tests will not return any output:

$ webalin https://www.djangoproject.com

$

Testing¶

cd tests
python tests.py

The unit tests are currently a very basic, only checking that an inaccessible document returns errors and an accessible one doesn’t. Better unit tests would involve testing each accessibility test individually. This is still TODO.