Accessibility Toolbars

Most of us love fancy gizmos to our favorite browsers. Information workers tend to spend a lot of time online, and browser add-ons make it a little more fun.

A while ago I ran across a link to a toolbar from Accessible Info Solutions. The toolbar integrates with Internet Explorer for Windows and comes with a slew of very useful tools. With this toolbar you can:

• Validate your HTML and CSS.
• Resize IE to emulate different screen sizes.
• Turn stylesheets on and off to make sure your pages are rendered well enough in very old browsers and devices with limited rendering capabilities (Internet-enabled wireless devices, for example).
• Turn images on and off. Some people turn images off to save bandwidth. Blind users don't see them in the first place.
• Inspect document structure: identify headings, lists, tables, divs, etc.
• Analyze color usage and contrast.
• Identify page meta information.
• Generate a page speed and weight report.

There's more to this toolbar than the humble list above. After a while, this toolbar becomes simply indispensable.

By the same token Firefox has a similar toolbar, Web Developer ver 0.7 as of the time of this writing. It has pretty much the same feature set, and you can tell it was coded with much care. Installing the toolbar is a piece of cake, or as Lazlo Gogolak would say, "A piece of pie".

What about Opera? I haven't looked around for such a toolbar for Opera yet, but right out of the box Opera comes with an HTML validator—an impressive move indeeed. In all honesty, all these HTML, CSS and Section 508 validators link to their respective web sites, but it's still better than nothing. In Opera you need to right click and select Frame | Validate source.

Note: a localhost page won't do because the validator will attempt to load it like a web bot would. As an alternative you can go directly to the validator services and paste your code. For your convenience I'm listing links to online validators below:

• W3C MarkUp Validation Service
• W3C CSS Validation Service
• Accessibility validator