Yesterday in her article on Accessibility Validation, Rachel Andrew showed us how to use the Cynthia Says validator to report on your site's Section 508 compliance, and how to understand the output!

Today we're throwing the spotlight on the latest release of the Web Accessibility Toolbar developed by the Accessible Information Solutions (AIS) team at the National Information and Library Service (NILS), Australia.

This Toolbar will not only help you to make your sites more accessible, it also has a great set of tools that can help you analyze the code in other sites, to enable you to develop your own skills.

Please note, this article may be freely reproduced as required to support the use of the Toolbar. All we ask is you acknowledge www.DMXzone.com and if you'd like to get back to us with any suggestions for improvments we'll try to incorporate them.

 

Free Web Development Tools: The Accessibility Toolbar Version 1.0

A couple of months ago my esteemed predecessor Bruce Lawson wrote an excellent article about the 0.9 Beta version of the freeware Web Accessibility Toolbar developed by the Accessible Information Solutions (AIS) team at the National Information and Library Service (NILS), Australia.

Recently (on the 8^th July) a new English language version was released (along with Japanese, Italian and French versions). This is a popular tool – as I sit to write this article a mere six days after release – there have already been approximately 20,000 downloads (so congratulations to Steven Faulkner and the rest of the team).

So first things first, what is the purpose of the toolbar – well to quote the development team:

"The Web Accessibility Toolbar has been developed to aid manual examination of web pages for a variety of aspects of accessibility. It consists of a range of functions that:

• Identify components of a web page
• Facilitate the use of 3rd party online applications
• Simulate user experiences
• Provide links to references and additional resources"

All in all then a pretty useful tool for anyone who wants to get to grips with testing their site – or as Bruce said in the previous article, learning from others by deconstructing their sites.

Basic Information

To download the Toolbar and get the entire documentation visit http://www.nils.org.au/ais/web/resources/toolbar/, the filesize is only 550Kb and the requirements are nothing too highbrow – Windows and IE 5 or higher with JavaScript enabled (it's been tested on Win 98, 2000, NT and XP).

One thing to note is that, because the Toolbar accesses files held on other sites (the NILS and W3C ones) you'll need to be connected to the Internet to get the full range of Toolbar function. Of course this does mean that over the lifetime of the Toolbar, you may notice some changes in the way things work if those files are revised. Furthermore, to allow for the fact development is very much an on-going process it does have an update function.

So download the file, double-click on AccessibilityToolbarSetup.exe and a couple of painless seconds later the toolbar is neatly installed into your browser (split for convenience):

Toolbar Functionality

OK, I'm not going to take you exhaustively through every single piece of functionality on the Toolbar – the documentation is available from the download site, but what I will do is just run briefly through the different options and highlight the ones that grabbed my attention.