Authors: how about accessibility testing integrated in Firebug?

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Aaron Leventhal

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Sep 24, 2008, 10:56:52 AM9/24/08
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Like the idea?

Have ideas about it?

Go to http://wiki.codetalks.org/wiki/index.php/Firebug_Roadmap

Or reply here.

- Aaron

Michael Goddard

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Sep 24, 2008, 11:13:04 AM9/24/08
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There are already numerous tools available specifically WAVE toolbar that do a great job for testing accessibility.  I think firebug should stay as is and test/debug javascript and hopefully add ARIA support when feasible.

My opinion.

Michael

Aaron Leventhal

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Sep 24, 2008, 3:45:01 PM9/24/08
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Michael,

There's one major difference. WAVE toolbar is probably downloaded by
1000s of people. The Firebug app is something that was downloaded over
13.5 million times since release 1.2.1.

I want accessibility testing to no longer be relegated to those folks
who knows what it means and are going to go look for a toolbar. It needs
to be integrated into mainstream tools to really bring awareness about.
Didn't you say lack of awareness was a major issue? :)

Also, why should I use 2 toolbars to debug when I can just have 1? And
why would I want separate ARIA testing from my other accessibility
testing? There's too much overlap to have a perfect separation anyway.

Through code reuse we plan to take the best stuff from the various
accessibility toolbars (WAT, WAVE, UIUC, WebAim) etc. and bring that
stuff together in one place. It just depends on whether the community is
finally ready to work together on these tools rather than all building
separate ones.

- Aaron

Michael A Squillace

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Sep 24, 2008, 7:15:18 PM9/24/08
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I love the idea and imagine being able to debug the state of your widget against a set of compliance guidelines at any particular instant during the execution of a script. Also, the more we can unify the tooling, the better. I still owe this group a write-up on the Eclipse Accessibility Tools Framework (ACTF), the primary goal of which is to unify many types of accessibility-related tooling in the Eclipse environment.

--> Mike Squillace
IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center
Accessibility Tools Framework (ACTF) co-technical lead
http://www.eclipse.org/actf

W:512.823.7423
M:512.970.0066

External: http://www.ibm.com/able
Internal: http://w3.ibm.com/able
Inactive hide details for Aaron Leventhal <aaron@moonset.net>Aaron Leventhal <aa...@moonset.net>



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Subject

Authors: how about accessibility testing integrated in Firebug?

S Lauriat

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Sep 24, 2008, 7:16:13 PM9/24/08
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Aaron,

Starting somewhere around version 1.1, Firebug has become more and more bloated, and I've since switched to using WebKit's (refreshed) Inspector for my primary dev tool. I've spoken with numerous developers who have lost faith in Firebug since the 1.0 release for the same reason. I very much agree with Michael's view, though I suppose making a Firebug extension that handles this might make a good compromise.

-Shawn

David Bolter

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Sep 24, 2008, 9:28:20 PM9/24/08
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Shawn,

The Web Inspector refresh looks very nice (I've only used Drosera with
WebKit/Safari). If we agree with Aaron (and I happen to) about
bringing accessibility checking to the fingertips of mainstream
devleopment, perhaps we want Web Inspector to have a11y checking
too? ...as well as IE8's debugger... and what about Opera?

cheers,
David

On Sep 24, 7:16 pm, "S Lauriat" <slaur...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Aaron,
> Starting somewhere around version 1.1, Firebug has become more and more
> bloated, and I've since switched to using WebKit's (refreshed)
> Inspector<http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/ProposedWebInspectorUIRefresh>
> > >     Go tohttp://wiki.codetalks.org/wiki/index.php/Firebug_Roadmap

David Bolter

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Sep 24, 2008, 9:29:43 PM9/24/08
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Thanks Michael, the ACTF is one of those seemingly awesome projects I
wish I had more time to explore. I'm looking forward to hearing how it
can help us.

cheers,
David

On Sep 24, 7:15 pm, Michael A Squillace <masqu...@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> I love the idea and imagine being able to debug the state of your widget
> against a set of compliance guidelines at any particular instant during the
> execution of a script. Also, the more we can unify the tooling, the better.
> I still owe this group a write-up on the Eclipse Accessibility Tools
> Framework (ACTF), the primary goal of which is to unify many types of
> accessibility-related tooling in the Eclipse environment.
>
> --> Mike Squillace
> IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center
> Accessibility Tools Framework (ACTF) co-technical leadhttp://www.eclipse.org/actf
>              Aaron Leventhal                                              
>              <aa...@moonset.ne                                            
>              t>                                                         To
>              Sent by:                  free...@googlegroups.com          
>              free-aria@googleg                                          cc
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>                                        Authors: how about accessibility    
>              09/24/2008 10:56          testing integrated in Firebug?      
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>
> Like the idea?
>
> Have ideas about it?
>
> Go tohttp://wiki.codetalks.org/wiki/index.php/Firebug_Roadmap
>
> Or reply here.
>
> - Aaron
>
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Michael A Squillace

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Sep 25, 2008, 8:48:31 AM9/25/08
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As a blind web aplication/accessibility tool developer, I'm wondering if this tool is anymore accessible than Firebug? We need accessible accessibility tools. From its description, it seems not.



--> Mike Squillace
IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center
Accessibility Tools Framework (ACTF) co-technical lead
http://www.eclipse.org/actf

W:512.823.7423
M:512.970.0066

External: http://www.ibm.com/able
Internal: http://w3.ibm.com/able

Inactive hide details for "S Lauriat" <slauriat@gmail.com>"S Lauriat" <slau...@gmail.com>



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Re: Authors: how about accessibility testing integrated in Firebug?

Aaron Leventhal

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Sep 25, 2008, 9:49:22 AM9/25/08
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I guess a Firebug extension might be where we start.

But if we *ever* want to make a dent on the zillions of inaccessible
websites constantly being developed, we need to have at least some a11y
stuff built right into the mainstream tools.
I'm tired of finding out that developers have no clue what accessibility
even is. A lot of Mozilla accessibility bugs are filed when people
couldn't access a network :)

Shawn, about the bloat -- are talking about codesize bloat or
UI/complexity bloat? Because the former can be dealt with via
intelligent code reuse, and the latter can at least be handled by
seamlessly integrating into existing features and rethinking some parts
of Firebug itself.

- Aaron


On 9/25/2008 1:16 AM, S Lauriat wrote:
> Aaron,
>
> Starting somewhere around version 1.1, Firebug has become more and
> more bloated, and I've since switched to using WebKit's (refreshed)
> Inspector

> <http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/ProposedWebInspectorUIRefresh> for my

> primary dev tool. I've spoken with numerous developers who have lost
> faith in Firebug since the 1.0 release for the same reason. I very
> much agree with Michael's view, though I suppose making a Firebug
> extension that handles this might make a good compromise.
>
> -Shawn
>
> On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 2:45 PM, Aaron Leventhal <aa...@moonset.net
> <mailto:aa...@moonset.net>> wrote:
>
>
> Michael,
>
> There's one major difference. WAVE toolbar is probably downloaded by
> 1000s of people. The Firebug app is something that was downloaded over

> 13.5 million times since release 1.2.1. <http://1.2.1.>

S Lauriat

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Sep 25, 2008, 11:12:34 AM9/25/08
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David,

Drosera seems to have merged into the new Inspector, so you still have (improved) JavaScript debugging, which makes me happy.

We definitely want it available for all browsers, and Opera has the Accessibility Toolbar (http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/wat-about.html - admittedly haven't looked at it in ages...), and I would love to see WebKit's Inspector allow extensibility so we can eventually get ARIA inspection, SVG inspection, etc. Having IE8 finally bring a JavaScript console to the browser after ten years of asking for one makes me happy enough. If they get around to adding accessibility tools, then all the better. Having a tool only available for one browser tends to make people develop primarily for that browser, leaving others lagging behind, or stuck in a buggy UI, like Firebug's influence on Ajax-driven sites a year or so ago.

-Shawn

P.S. Unfortunately, as a web developer with essentially no experience creating development tools for browsers, I can only bring the "I want" part of the conversation into the picture, rather than "and I'll start here" following shortly after.

S Lauriat

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Sep 25, 2008, 11:21:45 AM9/25/08
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Mike,

Definitely a good point, and they all unfortunately seem about on par... WebKit's Inspector should prove as accessible as a web application running in Safari (or as inaccessible... - same with Opera's new Dragonfly, since they both use XHTML/CSS/JavaScript, though Opera has a better screenreader available for Windows), and has keyboard navigation for some things, but definitely not to the point where I would have the ability to turn my screen off to test, debugging as I go. If they became more accessible, it would make work for both of us easier.

-Shawn

S Lauriat

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Sep 25, 2008, 11:37:23 AM9/25/08
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Aaron,

With the bloat, it seemed like a bit of both. It started getting sluggish and buggy, and kept having so many things added into it that it now defaults to having nothing available to you.

I completely agree with the frustration of talking to developers and having to start explaining what accessibility means. Quick story: last week, I talked at the Zend/PHP Conference about PHP5 features, and brought a couple copies of my book to give away. I did a quick little pop quiz to choose who would get them and first asked which screen reader had the most market share, to which I received twenty blank stares. I had to follow up with asking what a screen reader does before someone finally answered the first question (probably by looking it up on their iPhone).

This really, really needs to change, and the recent draft of the W3C's "Shared Web Experiences: Barriers Common to Mobile Device Users and People with Disabilities" ( http://www.w3.org/WAI/mobile/experiences ) has made it much easier for me to get ideas across to people without having to repeat myself over and over again. If we can get articles around relationships like this on development sites frequented by web developers, that might start helping to alleviate our awareness problem.

-Shawn

Aaron Leventhal

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Sep 25, 2008, 11:59:12 AM9/25/08
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I agree, let's not make Firebug feel more bloated. So we need to go
about this very intelligently. My suspicion is that the Firebug team is
aware of the problem. Maybe we can help out in redesign discussions.
There's a Firebug working group on Google groups as well:
http://groups.google.com/group/firebug-working-group

- Aaron

On 9/25/2008 5:37 PM, S Lauriat wrote:
> Aaron,
>
> With the bloat, it seemed like a bit of both. It started getting
> sluggish and buggy, and kept having so many things added into it that
> it now defaults to having nothing available to you.
>

> I /completely/ agree with the frustration of talking to developers and

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