Web Accessibility Toolbar 2011 – Updated

We have been working on bug fixes to the Web Accessibility Toolbar 2011, the update is now available for download, includes the latest version of aViewer.

In honour of Jim Thatcher’s important and continuing contribution to making the web a more accessible medium, I have worked on an update to the Web Accessibility Toolbar for Internet Explorer, which includes new features that he has developed.

Today At CSUN 2011, Jim Thatcher is being presented with a life time achievement award. Here at TPGi we join the many others in the Accessibility Community that wish to thank Jim for his continuing leadership, insight and guidance on web accessibility.

Jim has been a supporter of the Web Accessibility Toolbar since its initial release back in 2004. Of late, I have not had the time to work on developing the WAT. Jim emailed me last year with some scripts he had developed that provide additional features for checking web content. I had not incorporated these new features into the WAT, but thought the honouring of Jim at this years CSUN as the perfect excuse to pull my finger out and release an update. Its a leaner version than WAT 2.0, I have removed outdated, obsolete or buggy features, and added some new stuff.

WAT 2011

Changes:

  • additional features for inspecting images, skip links and tables developed by Jim Thatcher
  • bundled the aViewer application with the WAT
  • added back-in a references menu
  • Toolbar button to access the developer tools panel built in to Internet Explorer
  • HTML5 conformance checking
  • ARIA Landmark role display
  • HTML5 section elements display
  • removed a bunch of features that need updating or are obsolete.

NOTES:

Download

Web Accessibility Toolbar 2011 (2mb) (Updated 29/06/2011)

Thanks to Jim Thatcher and Jun (main contributor to the WAT, CCA and aViewer).

Categories: Technical

About Steve Faulkner

Steve was the Chief Accessibility Officer at TPGi before he left in October 2023. He joined TPGi in 2006 and was previously a Senior Web Accessibility Consultant at vision australia. Steve is a member of several groups, including the W3C Web Platforms Working Group and the W3C ARIA Working Group. He is an editor of several specifications at the W3C including ARIA in HTML and HTML Accessibility API Mappings 1.0. He also develops and maintains HTML5accessibility and the JAWS bug tracker/standards support.

Comments

roger says:

Nice one Steve and Jim, many, many thanks!

AMX says:

Sound great! Is this a whole new install, or will it update existing versions? (Will we need to uninstall the older version first?)

Cheers

andrew

Steve Faulkner says:

You can install over the top of existing installation. No need to uninstall.

Cliff Tyllick says:

Is a Firefox version also under development? Please, please, please?

Steve Faulkner says:

hi Cliff, it has been in the works for a while…

Thank you Steve for your work. This tool is very useful for us.

Kiwi says:

Thanks so much for the latest version of the Web Accessibility Toolbar. A top quality resource that I use all the time not only across my own site but others I assess as well.
A brilliant job – well done!

Steve, I can’t stress how much I want that toolbar for Firefox. 🙂

Hi. When you install it, it says, unhelpfully, that it’s available under “a Creative Commons license”. Which one? There are any number of Creative Commons licenses.

TRiG.

Steve Faulkner says:

See the bottom of the WAT documentation page.

I didn’t noticed the update until today – Thx for sharing!

Kiwi says:

Once again – a BRILLIANT 29/06/2011 update 🙂 The Function Accessibility Evaluator tool using FAE is a top quality resource to assist in achieving 100% valid web pages. As you will imagine I am now busy sorting out a few pages that require alteration. To say a mere thank you is not enough.

Monique says:

I support the request of Denis, I hope this tool also for Firefox!

Joe says:

Use the toolbar everyday, great bit of work and a real time saver.

I would love to see the ability to highlight the focus order of elements on a page, which I think was a feature of the earlier versions of this toolbar. I still find people using the tabindex attribute inconsistently, and found this feature invaluable before.

Thanks again for such a useful utility!