Web Access Centre Blog

This is really exciting, the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium (WAT-C) have just released a simplified Chinese version of the Web Accessibility Toolbar. This is fantastic news as it’s so hard to find resources in Chinese for web accessibility let alone tools. This can be downloaded from The Paciello Group blog where you’ll also find links to resources in Chinese.

I’ll be headed over to Beijing in April for the W4A and WWW2008 conferences where I’ll be speaking about the cross over between mobile and web accessibility. If you’re going to be there come by and say hi.

Read about and download the Chinese Web Accessibility Toolbar.

Many of you might be aware that as of the 1st February this year, Bobby and WebXact are no longer publicly available online. Bobby and WebXact were great tools for giving you a quick overview of the accessibility of a single web page free of charge. While there is only so much automated testing tools can do, they never the less have their place in the arsenal of anyone testing websites.

After the news, we had a couple of emails come our way from people asking if we knew of any alternatives to Bobby and WebXact and the answer is…we do! There is a great resource available on the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) site which is a complete list of web accessibility evaluation tools. This would be a good place to start for anyone looking to find a new tool to use.

These are some of the favourites used by our team. Interestingly, the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC) tool includes support for checking against the draft WCAG 2.0 guidelines.

• Cynthia Says
• WAVE
• ATRC Web Accessibility Checker

For those wishing to do some more manual checks with a little assistance, there are some great accessibility toolbars and plug-ins available for Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox (FF).

• Web Accessibility Toolbar for IE
• Chris Pederick’s Web Developer Toolbar for FF
• Jon Gunderson’s Firefox Accessibility Extension

Finally, some links to the well known Markup Validation Services provided by the W3C.

• (X)HTML, SMIL, MathML Validation
• CSS Validation

We hope these help!

The latest tool release from the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium…

Cedric Trevisan of TPG (Europe) and WAT-C has developed a version of the Colour Contrast Analyser for the Mac OS X 10.4.6 or later. It can be used to check for conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1 and 2 checkpoints relating to contrast issues using the colour brightness/colour difference formulas and the contrast ratio algorithm.

Download the Colour Contrast Analyser for the Mac OS X 10.4.6

The latest release for the Web Accessibility Toolbar is available for download was announced today.

Whats new version 2.0

Compatible with IE 7 and Vista
All functions (except third party) no longer rely upon external scripts.
Most functions now work when javascript is disabled Most functions (where applicable) work across frames & iframes HTML validator - checks files from a local server or folder.

New functionality:

- Log window: when the log text box is opened, any messages that a function provides are written to the log window (instead of an alert box). Text can also be entered into the log text box. this info can be saved to a text file.
- Open in Firefox and opera buttons: opens the current page in firefox or Opera (if installed)
-HTML validation quick check: returns summary check results from the W3C validator.
- Frames list: provides access to any framed documents generated source highlighter: generated source views with elements highlighted.
- Focus highlighter
- Functional Accessibility Evaluator
- Plus others and upgrades to existing functions

Feedback welcome

A new version of the Colour Contrast Analyzer has been released and is now available for download.

This version implements the updated contrast algorithm and provides results based on Guideline 1.4 of the May 2007 working draft of WCAG 2.0.

Please note: there was an issue with some text labels and the results for color deficits, this has now been resolved, please take the time to download another copy of the software if you have downloaded it in the first hour of its release, 13.30 GMT.

Web Accessibility Toolbar for Opera 1.1 has now been released.

For more information about the Web Accessibility Toolbar, different langauge and browser versions visit the Web Accessibility Toolbar Consortium

New version of the Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE) and the Firefox Accessibility Extension are now available.

1. Mozilla/Firefox Accessibility Extension 1.0

New Features in Version 1.00.1

(a) Send dynamically generated web pages to Functional Accessibility Evaluator for accessibility evaluations and reporting

(b) Menu reorganization to match organization of CITES/DRES Web Accessibility Best Practices

(c) Links to accessibility checkers in the “Tools” options

(d) Improved keyboard navigation features

2. Functional Accessibility Evaluator 0.9.1

2.1. This release introduces user accounts, which should have the following effects:

(a) spam-bot attacks should be less frequent if not prevented altogether, and

(b) this should speed up evaluations for registered users. (In a follow-up release, the addition of user accounts will permit selective display of Archived Reports on a per-user basis.)

2.2 Changes to rules/tests:
(a) The Scripting/Dynamic Content test that detects the use of the JavaScript functions document.write and document.writeln has been removed;

(b) The Navigation Bars test that reports whether lists of links are immediately preceded by a header element has been modified such that one or more violations of the rule produce, at maximum, a warning.

2.3. Firefox Web Accessibility Extension Support Test dynamically generated web pages using the Firefox Web Accessibility Extension. The extension sends the dymaically generated web page to FAE to generate an accessibility report.

And here’s part 2 of the follow-up by etre.com on the problems faced by sites with the introduction of IE7. In this article, they look at some of the specific problems they identified, and at the effect, in IE7, of some of the workarounds and hacks which worked in IE6.

Wake up and smell the IE7!

Following on from their informal survey of how websites fared in IE6 and IE7, the guys at etre.com have written a couple of follow-up articles. Here’s part 1, looking at the background, and at whether it’s the standards-compliant or tag soup websites that seem to fare best in IE7.

Internet Explorer 7: were you ready?

There have been warnings galore over the past couple of years (including some from Microsoft themselves) of how badly websites are likely to cope when viewed in IE7. This being because it’s more standards compliant than previous versions, and also because Microsoft have said they have not designed IE7 to be particularly backwards compatible with quirks and non-standards compliant features of earlier version of Internet Explorer.

So I was interested to see a link to an informal check carried out by Etre (the company that does the eye-tracking stuff I mentioned seeing in one of the presentations at that Online Public Services conference I chaired a few weeks back). They checked the home pages of the websites of the FTSE-100 companies in IE6 and IE7, to see how many fell apart in IE7.

IE7: Were they ready?

And did they find the web in meltdown? Well, no, not really. 87 of the 100 sites displayed and functioned identically in the two versions of IE, and in the 13 others, the differences were pretty small.

Now they say themselves that this was far from a truly scientific survey, and they looked just at the front page of each site. It’s quite possible that horrors lurk below the surface of some of these sites, but given the lack of standards compliance that one tends to find on these corporate sites, it may be that the release of IE7 won’t cause quite such a mess on the web as some feared.

Mind you - if you do find any sites which work in IE6 but fall apart in a serious way in IE7, do post the details here so we can all take a look. :)