Bowser toolbars redux

• Web Devel­oper Extension
• Acces­si­bil­ity Exten­sions for Mozilla
• Fangs: The Fire­fox Screen Reader Emu­la­tor Extension
• Shark­ware, JAWS Screen Reader Adap­ta­tion for Mozilla Firefox

All of these are for Fire­fox, of course. Go nuts with these and let us all know what works and what doesn’t.

Accessible Writing Links

All the tech­nol­ogy in the world won’t mat­ter if your web con­tent is hard to read. This can be a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem for any­one who uses “insider” talk, like research insti­tutes, col­leges, and non­prof­its. This isn’t a com­plete list, but I recently found two sites that might help.

Craw­ford Killian’s “Writ­ing for the Web” blog — Dis­cus­sion and resources from some­one who stays informed.

The Poyn­ter online-writing list­serv — Low-traffic list for the web-writing com­mu­nity. A cou­ple of peo­ple post writ­ing sem­i­nar announcements.

Readability.info — Ana­lyzes web text for read­ing level, like the func­tion on Microsoft Word. The site won’t write good web con­tent for you, but it might be a use­ful tool.

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Oh, a note– I’m ICI’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions spe­cial­ist, so I spent a lot of time edit­ing mate­r­ial for the web.

Browsers as test platforms

There is an inter­est­ing arti­cle from accross the pond about how to use browsers to develop and debug html struc­ture, javascript, CSS etc. Read it and dis­cuss below.

Firefox is here!

I’ve used Fire­fox as my pri­mary browser for devel­op­ment for the past year and it has per­formed great. I highly rec­om­mend it for you and your orga­ni­za­tion. From mozilla.org:

The wait is over. Fire­fox 1.0 empow­ers you to browse faster, more safely and more effi­ciently than with any other browser. Join more than 8 mil­lion oth­ers and make the switch today � Fire­fox imports your Favorites, set­tings and other infor­ma­tion, so you have noth­ing to lose.

Accessible Search Engine

With­out a doubt, my favorite online learn­ing tool is Google where I can gen­er­ally find answers to just about what­ever real world prob­lem I hap­pen to be fac­ing at any given time. I’m not sure how acces­si­ble Google and other major search engines are (or aren’t) but I just came across YouSe­arched which bills itself as The Acces­si­ble Search. I would doubt that the qual­ity of search results is as high as the big play­ers, but some of the fea­tures may be nice for cer­tain situations.