New WAVE Version Released

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.