WAVE Blog

As part of our launch of the Spanish language version of WAVE, we recently updated several components of the WAVE backend framework and evaluation rules.

In addition to the Spanish version, notable new features include:

• Better Unicode support
  • WAVE support for UTF-8 has been vastly improved. Evaluation of web content containing Unicode characters or foreign languages should now work correctly.
• New evaluation rules.
  • Missing structure. WAVE now issues an alert on pages that do not contain any headings. While this may not be an error on all web content, most full size documents should have a heading structure. The absence of any headings is usually an indication accessibility issues - that the document needs structure or that visual headings should be marked up as true headings.
  • Empty link. WAVE now flags as an error all links that do not contain any text. Because links provide functionality, assistive technologies require some text to be read when the link is encountered. If a link is empty, screen readers will revert to reading the link URL, which often is not helpful.

In addition, lots of small bugs and other issues were fixed, many of which were originally reported to us by WAVE users.

Una versión en español de este anuncio está disponible en este enlace: http://wave.webaim.org/es/

WebAIM is excited to announce the release of the Spanish version (first announced last year) of the WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool. This version also includes several updates, bug fixes, and a couple of new rules.

The Center for Persons with Disabilities at Utah State University funded the translation of the WAVE web tool and Firefox toolbar into Spanish.

Jon Whiting and Diogenes Hernandez, members of the WebAIM team, coordinated this project. We would like to give special thanks to Nestor Rojas who gave significant feedback and to all others who contributed to the beta version of the Spanish translation.

This is a great success for WebAIM, and we would appreciate your help to expand WAVE even more. To do this, you can spread the word and translate into other languages. If you are able, please circulate this announcement to Spanish-language accessibility forums and discussion lists and to Spanish-speaking individuals. Also, if you would like to help us translate WAVE into another language, let us know.

A new, much improved version of the WAVE Firefox Toolbar has been released. This version includes numerous updates, bug fixes, and new features, including:

• Support for several new tests and icons.
• Increased accuracy of tests and reporting.
• Better support for complex pages, including processing of pages with frames and iframes.
• Customizable shortcut key functionality to quickly and easily process WAVE reports.
• WAVE icons now feature a tooltip window that provides additional detail about the icon. Simply place your mouse over an icon to see these additional details.
• A new context menu. Right click…, WAVE Toolbar…, then select a report option.This context menu can be turned on or off in the Options.
• An improved mini-toolbar. You can drag the WAVE toolbar icon onto any other Firefox toolbar for quick access to WAVE Toolbar functionality while using only a small amount of screen real estate.

Download the new toolbar at http://wave.webaim.org/toolbar

WebAIM is pleased to announce that a new version of WAVE was released today. This significant update reflects many months of work on our part to make WAVE more stable, powerful, and useful. Since the version 4 beta was launched just over a year ago, WAVE has been used to analyze nearly a million web pages for accessibility. Today’s launch signifies a significant step forward in making WAVE the most powerful and useful (and ALWAYS free) web accessibility tool available.

Notable new and improved features:

• Simplified and streamlined user interface
• Significantly re-engineered back-end framework
  • Better stability and significantly faster processing of pages
  • Single sourced code for server version of WAVE and the Firefox toolbar
  • More powerful and flexible logic for WAVE evaluation rules
• Support for internationalization. Initial translations will be provided in coming months.
• Several new WAVE rules
  • Missing fieldset - alert when a group of check boxes or radio buttons is not enclosed in a fieldset
  • ARIA - indicator for all ARIA roles, properties, and attributes
  • Unlabeled form element with title - alerts users to form elements that do not have an associated label, but do have the necessary title attribute
  • Blink
  • Many other rules have been further polished and improved for accuracy

All of these new features and many more are currently being implemented into an updated Firefox toolbar which will be available in the near future.

We are always open to feedback and hope that you will take some time to review the new WAVE features and let us know how we can make it even better.

WebAIM is excited to announce that we are beginning translation of the WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool. There are relatively few web accessibility evaluation tools available in other languages, and we feel that none of them are as advanced or user-friendly as WAVE. The Center for Persons with Disabilities at Utah State University is funding an initial translation of a Spanish-language version of the WAVE web-based tool and Firefox toolbar and the development of a framework that will support translation into many other languages. Diogenes Hernandez and Jon Whiting, both Spanish speaking members of the WebAIM team, will be coordinating these efforts.

During the first phase of this project, which begins December 2008, we will develop a framework that facilitates the translation of WAVE. We will then begin translation of the WAVE evaluation rules and supporting documentation. A private alpha and public beta versions of the translated tool will be available in spring of 2009. The final Spanish-language version of WAVE will be released no later than June 2009.

You can help

Although WebAIM staff will provide the bulk of the translation work, you can help in several ways.

Improve translation of the WAVE feedback.

Every WAVE icon has a title, a description, and recommended actions that must be translated.

Improve the accuracy of WAVE rules.

For example, you can help us identify examples of inappropriate alt text (“image of”, “spacer”, etc.) or link text (“click here”, etc.) in Spanish.

Improve the translation of the WAVE site and toolbar.

We hope to translate additional content on the WAVE site and toolbar and toolbar (e.g., help files).

Identify WAVE bugs and offer suggestions for improvement.

While WAVE is a very stable tool, there are still bugs. As part of the translation process, we are going to refine our bug reporting process to make it easier for you to let us know what we can improve.

Spread the word.

We have provided a Spanish-language translation of this announcement. If you are able, please circulate this announcement to Spanish-language accessibility forums and discussion lists and to Spanish-speaking individuals.

Be ready for translation into other languages.

If you would like to help us translate WAVE into another language, let us know. We don’t plan on translating WAVE into other languages until this initial Spanish-language version is finalized, but we would love to hear from you now if you can provide or help with other language translations.

If you would be interested in helping in any of the ways mentioned above, contact Jon Whiting. A Spanish-language translation (traducción en español) of this announcement is available.

On November 12, Jon Whiting and I presented a session titled “Using WAVE 4.0 to Evaluate your Web Content” at the 2008 Accessing Higher Ground conference in Boulder, Colorado. It was primarily a lab-style session, but our slides (the few that we had) are available at http://wave.webaim.org/presentations/ahg2008/.

We’ve long struggled with the proper role for the italics and bold rules in WAVE. Up until today, all instances of <i> and <b> were flagged as alerts with a description of “ALERT: Deprecated italic (or bold) tag - use <em> (or <strong>) or CSS instead.” They have appeared this way in WAVE for, well, as long as there has been WAVE - about 6 years. Recently, observant WAVE user Joan informed us that <i> and <b> are not actually deprecated in HTML or XHTML. Who knew?

While not deprecated, <i> and <b> are intended to provide a purely visual offset for content. <em> and <strong>, on the other hand, provide an additional semantic meaning - emphasis or strong emphasis. The W3C recommends that these tags be used appropriately.

In a perfect world, screen readers would identify <em> and <strong> content by either reading them louder, with an inflection, a different voice, or some other way. But even today, screen readers mostly ignore emphasized content, in addition to ignoring <i> and <b>.

So even if a WAVE user changed italicized and bold content appropriately to <em> and <strong>, this really does not have an impact on real-world accessibility. Yes, it would increase compliance with coding standards, but we focus on accessibility in WAVE, not only standards compliance. As such, the b, i, em, and strong rules (and associated icons) are now removed from the default icons view in WAVE. They will, however, remain in the structure/order view with updated descriptions to inform users of their proper use. We believe that this change will not result in decreased functionality (you can still check for these issues in structure/order view) and will make the default icons view a bit cleaner and more targeted to real-world accessibility issues.

This update will be reflected in a future build of the WAVE toolbar.

Since it was launched in January, the server version of WAVE has processed nearly 500,000 distinct WAVE reports! We are thrilled that it has been so popular.

We spend a lot of time monitoring WAVE to make sure it is functioning properly and is not being abused/misused. Recently, there has been a great increase in the number of automate bot and spam submissions to WAVE. This has resulted in degraded performance for legitimate users. WAVE now includes some tests to guard against this type of misuse.

The newly updated WAVE code now detects most automated spam submissions. It has better checks for properly formatted URLs, ensures that uploaded code is submitted from the WAVE homepage, detects inappropriate content, and a few other things. WAVE now auto-blacklists IP addresses that are misusing WAVE. After 10 instances of abuse, the IP address is automatically blacklisted.

Identifying less blatant abuses of WAVE is very difficult. WAVE limits the number of submissions per minute and hour and day. These limitations are to ensure that all users have access to WAVE and that some users are not misusing WAVE or automating WAVE reports (something that is against our Terms of Use, though we do grant permission to do this in certain instances). Despite these limitations, we’ve had one IP address that has processed 6700 WAVE reports and 20 distinct IP address have run over 1000 WAVE reports! There are certainly some power-WAVE users out there!

Distinguishing between users that use WAVE a lot and bots is very difficult. To ensure better performance for legitimate users, we have loosened the limitations on the number of reports that can be processed in any given time period, but at the same time have implemented much harsher penalties for going over those limitations. When a user surpasses the limitations or submits automated or spam-like content to WAVE, they are given several warnings. Continued abuse will result in an automatic blacklisting of their IP address.

We know of several instances where WAVE reports have been implemented into quality assurance, content management, and site authoring systems. We are thrilled that WAVE is being used in such ways and want to ensure that such uses of WAVE do not result in a blacklisting. If you are interested in using WAVE to perform automated or site-wide reports or if you want to automatically post content directly to the WAVE result page (e.g., bypass the homepage), please contact us and describe how you are using WAVE. If appropriate, we can add your IP address to a whitelist or provide a key that bypasses many of these tests.

We hope these changes improve WAVE for everyone. We plan to continue monitoring and make further tweaks or changes in the future as necessary as we continue our efforts to make WAVE the best accessibility evaluation tool available.

Today we launched some web site changes.

Cosmetic and Client-side Changes

• Fixed some layout issues to resolve overlapping page elements at very low resolutions. WAVE pages now span the entire screen width.
• Fixed some minor script compatibility issues with Internet Explorer 6.
• Added a few script-driven accessibility enhancements.
• Dramatically optimized and cleaned up the scripting used on the site. It now uses 2 .js files instead of 6. Progressive enhancement of WAVE functionality (streamlined interface, tooltips, accordian effect on homepage, automatic toggling of page styles, etc.) is done using the MooTools framework.

Updated Help Page

One of the most common questions we get from WAVE users is, “What guidelines does WAVE use? WCAG? Section 508? Others?” This question is now properly addressed on the Help page. In short, WAVE does not limit itself to specific guidelines. We use common guidelines to help develop WAVE tests, but WAVE includes as many real life aspects of accessibility as we have been able to come up with. WAVE also flags some accessibility issues as errors even though they are not identified in any set of guidelines. Our approach with WAVE is to help web content become accessible, not merely compliant with guidelines or standards. While WAVE is a powerful tool in determining compliance, it does not directly identify aspects of compliance or non-compliance to specific guidelines.

We’re happy to announce the release of an updated version of the WAVE Toolbar. You can install the new version at http://wave.webaim.org/toolbar - or if you already have the toolbar, you can force the update by going to the Add-ons menu in Firefox and selecting Find Updates.

While still in beta, this release includes many updates and additional features.

Firefox 3 compatibility

The updated toolbar provides full support for Firefox 3. There were some issues with the previous toolbar version in the Release Candidate versions of FF3. It also is MUCH faster in FF3.

New mini-toolbar button

The new toolbar now includes a small WAVE button that can be positioned almost anywhere within the chrome of Firefox, giving you quick access to WAVE functionality. The button can even be positioned on OTHER toolbars, such as the Bookmarks toolbar.

To move the WAVE button, right click on the toolbar, select Customize… and then drag the button (or any of the WAVE buttons for that matter) to its new location on the Firefox window. You can even add the button to other Add-ons. When you’re done, click Done in the Customize window.

New features

• There is a new Reset Page icon that returns the page to it’s un-WAVEed status. This does not refresh the page.
• There is a new Toggle styles icon that allows you to remove the page styles and linearize tables. Beyond being a great evaluation tool by itself, this is also useful on pages that become broken or cluttered when a WAVE report is displayed.
• You can now customize the toolbar to display both icons and labels, icons only, or labels only. This can be helpful if you want to reduce the size or display of the toolbar.

Bug fixes

• If you select two reports consecutively, the reports now display correctly.
• WAVE now properly displays icons withing nested frames and iframes.
• The possible heading rule is much more accurate with fewer false alerts.
• Fixed a bug that incorrectly flagged any image with missing alt text within a link as an error. If you have an image with empty alt text within a link, it is no longer an error as long as there is text within the link or another image that has alternative text. Any image with a missing alt attribute is still flagged as an error.
• Fixed a bug that displayed an error if an image with alt text was used as a label for a form element.

The updates to WAVE rules above have also been implemented into the server version of WAVE.

While you’re checking out WAVE, it would be really great if you could take a few moments to post a review and rating of the toolbar at the Firefox Add-ons Site. Without reviews and ratings, the toolbar will be forever marked as “experimental”.

If you have any feedback or recommendations for WAVE or the WAVE toolbar, please send us feedback.