It will continue to be available here at wave.webaim.org, but making it available on the Mozilla site will give it more exposure.

Of note, it is listed as an ‘experimental’ add-on because it has not gone through Mozilla’s review process which apparently is taking several weeks right now. You can help by rating the toolbar and leaving a quick review.

We had many excellent conversations about WAVE at CSUN and it was fun to show it off a bit. We have MANY ideas for future development and are currently working on fixing some current bugs, increasing optimization, and moving both the server version and toolbar out of beta. As always, your feedback is very helpful. We’ll post more details about the future of WAVE in the coming weeks.

The toolbar processes web content as it appears within the Firefox browser and does not rely upon server processing to generate a WAVE report. This allows secure evaluation of password protected, intranet, dynamically generated, or sensitive web pages. Because the WAVE toolbar evaluates the rendered version of your page, locally displayed styles and dynamically-generated content from scripts or AJAX can be evaluated.

This is very much a beta release. A few key features are missing in this version that will be made available in a future release in the coming weeks:

• The icon tooltips that provide additional information about the WAVE icons are not present. However, alt and title text for the icons do provide a brief overview of what the icon is indicating. Additionally, a toolbar button will display the full icons key in a new tab.
• Page-wide icons (such as those for missing page title, meta refresh, etc.) do not display.
• There is no option to disable styles, though the WAVE toolbar can be used in conjunction with the Web Developer or other toolbars to remove the document styles and leave the WAVE icons in place.
• There is not a direct indication of how many (if any) accessibility errors are in the document. You must scan for red icons to see if there are obvious errors.

Again, all of these features will be implemented into the toolbar in the near future. Additionally, we will soon have full Firefox 3 support.

We have lots of ideas for the WAVE toolbar, but would appreciate any feedback, bug reports, or recommendations you have. You can either post a comment below or use the feedback form.

The WAVE developers from WebAIM will be using this blog to post information about WAVE updates and future developments. We invite you to check back often or subscribe to the RSS feed and participate in the discussion here. We want WAVE to be the most powerful, user-friendly web accessibility evaluation tool on the planet and appreciate your use of WAVE and invite you to post any feedback or recommendations you may have.