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.