Personally, I feel unless its easily validates via an external tool like the offline version of Watchfire WCAG, it’s not worth my time as a developer testing against.

I only know of the Watchfire program (which you have to buy over telephone) which tests a whole website on your computer for accessibility and gives you really helpful advice about how to resolve accessibility problems. What program do you use?

Any tools for WCAG 1, or 2 must be made freely available to all to verify accessibility, but equally solutions must be readily available for all to understand and to implement; or else the very word “accessibility” will become an ironic statement based upon the vacuousness of the very subject itself.

To put it bluntly, an automated tool cannot tell you whether or not a website is accessible. What it can do — and can do well is to automatically check certain things — like whether or not your pages validate, and whether or not your images have alt text.

It can’t do the clever stuff and decide what the meaning is that the image provides to your page, and whether or not your alt text it appropriate.

Remember to use your automated tools just as a starting point. But as tools go, I’d recommend:

1.Chris Pederick’s web developer toolbar for firefox
2.Vision Australia’s Accessibility toolbar for Internet Explorer and Opera
3.the TAW3 automated accessibility checker

…I’ll update this with links when I get time…