JavaWoman considers…

I was doing some research for upcoming posts, involving validating pages for syntax and accessibility. I use Firefox for that, where I have installed both the Web Developer Extension and the Accessibility Extension. Both give handy access to a variety of online testing tools, and while there's some overlap, each has tools the other doesn't so I use both. I was having some temporary problems with HiSoftware's Cynthia Says™ so I switched to WebAIM's WAVE for a bit.

I really like WAVE. It's a free web accessibility evaluation tool, and it's a bit quirky. Its “reports” take some getting used to because they're not really reports: instead, they plaster little icons all over the page … red icons for errors, yellow icons for alerts, green icons for accessibility features, and light blue icons for information and structural elements. It can look a real mess at first, but each icon has a tooltip with a detailed explanation and once you get used to it it's actually very useful: you don't need to go backwards and forwards between a page and a report: the page is the report. I went through all my pages here on My Opera (some warnings I have to fix, and some errors Opera should fix, but that's for a later post), and then noticed they now have a blog, so I went and had a look.

This allows secure evaluation of password protected, intranet, dynamically generated, or sensitive web pages.

Well, the paint isn't even dry on that yet! The first post was last Thursday, announcing the blog, and then there's yesterday's post, announcing the release of the WAVE toolbar. That's great news, because unlike the online testing tools the Web Developer and Accessibility toolbars give access to, this actually works on the page as it's rendered inside Firefox. The advantage of that is that what it tests is the result of the (X)HTML code plus all stylesheets and even JavaScript applied to it … something the online tools can't do. So if your stylesheets and JavaScript are selectively hiding and unhiding page elements, you can now test the result of that. That's a really exciting feature!

Even though this toolbar is officially still in beta, I would say this is already essential kit for web developers, just like the Web Developer extension and the Accessibility extension. It's certainly a welcome new member of my testing team since I immediately downloaded and installed it. I also have a wish list already:

1. I'd like an option to show icons only, no text: the toolbar is just a bit too wide to fit on a 800px-wide browser window
2. And while looking for such an option I naturally gravitated to the “Options” button which provides a number of functions (like testing the page with the online version of WAVE), but no options! So call that “Extra” or something, and provide a button to specify some options, like icons without text!

But both of those are cosmetic, really. My first run-through did not show anything amiss. Welcome to my toolbox!

Tagged: accessibility, testing