WAVE Blog

WebAIM is excited to announce the beta release of a WAVE Dreamweaver Extension. This extension allows you to evaluate the accessibility of content using the popular WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool directly within Adobe Dreamweaver. The Dreamweaver extension gives additional flexibility and speed to Adobe Dreamweaver users by integrating WAVE directly into the Dreamweaver environment.

When activated, the extension sends the active web page document (or selected portions of the document) from Dreamweaver to the WAVE server for evaluation, then displays the full WAVE report directly within Dreamweaver or within your default web browser.

Note that this is a beta release. Please give us your opinion and if you have any questions, issues, or bugs to report, please contact us.

Download the WAVE Dreamweaver Extension

We are seeking feedback on your usage of WAVE and ways that we can make WAVE better for you. Please take a few minutes to complete our brief, 5-minute survey and provide us feedback that will guide future development of WAVE.

UPDATE: The WAVE user survey is now closed. Thanks to everyone who participated.

Today we have updated the online version of WAVE. The changes include some bug fixes and new features, such as updating the backend to use XulRunner1.9.1 (i.e., Firefox 3.5), which should make WAVE faster and more reliable.

Some of these fixes are also being implemented into an updated Firefox toolbar version and will be available in the near future.

If you have any comments or questions we are always open to feedback. It is in our best interest to make WAVE more stable, powerful, and useful every day and with your help we can make it even better every day.

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.