Steve Faulkner, from The Paciello Group, just announced the beta release of their new Accessibility Viewer application aViewer. The purpose of the application is to give easy access to what information the browser is reporting back through Accessibility APIs. It’s an interesting application, and certainly has the potential to provide useful information in the future.
It is in beta, of course, so it may not function entirely perfectly — in my installation, I had trouble getting a few features to work properly. I couldn’t get the cursor view to do anything at all, for example, nor could I get the cursor tool to turn on using F5, as the documentation describes. The Code view only seemed to show the text values for links — and nothing elsewhere. (For reference, this is on Windows Vista using Firefox 3.6.3.)
Nonetheless, I can see the potential for this software as a helpful tool for exploring both the accessibility of an interface and the awareness of a browser concerning that information. It’s a good idea, and with feedback is likely to become a useful tool, as well!
Steve is asking for feedback, so be sure to install this in your environment and take a look.
steve faulkner
>I guess that the innerHTML view is pretty much useless as a code view in Firefox, >then — but that’s good to know.
when down at the individual element level which only contain text nodes yes, its a problem we are working on.
>It’s still pretty clearly the case that F5 does not enable the cursor view, however.
thanks for picking this bug up!
Joe Dolson
Thanks, Steve. You’re right – it does work, but it takes a while to take the focus. I hadn’t let the cursor rest on an object long enough to receive focus. That may be a good thing to mention in your post — that time delay may well be confusing for many people.
I guess that the innerHTML view is pretty much useless as a code view in Firefox, then — but that’s good to know.
It’s still pretty clearly the case that F5 does not enable the cursor view, however.
steve faulkner
hi Joe , thanks for the write up and the feedback! The cursor view should work. suggest enabling the highlight rectangle so you can see where the cursor focus is. the highlight rectangle should settle on an element when you stop moving the cursor for a few seconds.
>The Code view only seemed to show the text values for links — and >nothing elsewhere.
sounds like you are using it with firefox? the code view show (innerhtml)in firefox so the innerhtml of a link is the text.