Better Accessibility Support in Firefox 3.1

Marco Zehe wrote on his blog about better accessibility support in Firefox 3.1. There will be text attributes and spell checking support!. This means that assistive technologies now have access to the attributes of any text run on a page. This patch has been included in Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1a1pre) Gecko/2008071803 Minefield/3.1a1pre).

Right now, accessibility has become dominant and more interesting for many people. Lot's of application are focusing on accessibility, for example WordPress 2.6

Automated Accessibility Testing

If you think automated accessibility testing is expensive and complex, then think again. Now you can use WAVE - Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools to help you automate the process. All you need to do is enter your site and let the system do the rest. You can also upload the files or copy the whole code in the textbox and let them verify it. Is that it? No!!! You can also install the toolbar (Firefox extension), use the bookmarket, and add the URL in other application (eg. WebDeveloper extension).

WAVE is a free web accessibility evaluation tool provided by WebAIM. It is used to aid humans in the web accessibility evaluation process. Rather than providing a complex technical report, WAVE shows the original web page with embedded icons and indicators that reveal the accessibility information within your page.

Even though it's marked as Beta, i found it very stable and usable. Try it for yourself and see the results.

One good example of a good website that combines accessibility and creativity is CSSZenGarden. The system found no accessibility errors on that site while it continues to amaze lots of people by it's beauty of design.

Firefox Blocker Site

Even though Firefox gains a lot of users nowadays, there were still some sites who doesn't like or became inaccessible when viewed using other browser than IE. Check this list and you will be quite surprised, since some of them are big sites. I think they should start working to make their site browser-friendly by removing the text "We only support Internet Explorer".

What's the point of only supporting a single browser? People around the world has their own browser preferences and some have known that Opera, Firefox, Konqueror, or Safari works best (or better) than IE in most cases, so they choose that browser. If a site only accept IE, then they are wasting lots of customer who didn't have IE on their computer (mostly are from Linux people). If others can switch, why wouldn't they?