Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility with Firefox
In this article, Chris Pederick's Web Developer toolbar is used for a preliminary assessment of a web site's accessibility.
Although awareness of web accessibility has steadily increased in recent years, many web developers are still uncertain about how to evaluate their sites. The relative complexity of documents such as the W3C WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 and the wealth of - sometimes contradictory - advice found on sites dedicated to the subject can leave developers wondering about the practical aspects of testing.
Often developers lack time or training and simply rely on one of the many automated testing tools such as WebXACT, Cynthia , or Wave. But even those mechanical checks need to be supplemented (and, to avoid false positives, counter-checked) by manual checks.
Based on some of the WCAG 1.0 checkpoints, this article aims to provide a quick outline of how Mozilla Firefox and the Web Developer toolbar can help with these manual checks.