Other Resources

WAVE Toolbar Development

Through funding by NCDAE, WAVE functionality was greatly expanded to include a Firefox toolbar. WAVE is an accessibility evaluation tool. It provides easy-to-use feedback regarding the accessibility and usability of Web content. Previous to this development, WAVE functionality was limited to public web pages or to file upload. For developers working on intranet pages or those who did not have Internet access, this limited their ability to use the tool. NCDAE development allowed a complete restructuring of WAVE core code to allow not only a better Web-based interface, but also the client-side Firefox Toolbar. This toolbar can evaluate a page's accessibility in one click of a mouse. Because processing is done on the end-user's computer, there is not need to make the evaluated page either publicly available or uploaded to the WAVE server.

This development of WAVE functionlity is being continued by WebAIM to include evaluation of XUL (an authoring framework for applications) and will be used to create a more powerful web-based version of WAVE. The current WAVE Firefox Toolbar is available for beta testing upon request.