We have discovered and fixed an issue in Worldspace FireEyes that affected new users and made it impossible for them to use the product at all. The issue also caused Firebug to stop working. The fix has been deployed to the download site and can be downloaded from: http://fireeyes.dequecloud.com/fireeyes_download.php
To check that you have the correct version installed go to Tools->Add Ons from within Firefox. You should see “Worldspace FireEyes 0.3.1″ as the installed version of FireEyes. If you do not see this, then you will need to download the latest release.
On Monday, July 26, President Obama will hold an event at the White House to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush on this date in 1990.
Preety Kumar, President & Founder of Deque Systems, one of the first web accessibility-focused companies in the United States, has been invited to attend the festivities.
In addition to remarks by President Obama, attendees will enjoy performances by Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, Patti LaBelle and Marlee Matlin, and remarks by Marca Bristo, President of Access Living, White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett and Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council Melody Barnes.
The feedback we have received so far on the beta 1 for Worldspace FireEyes has been great. I have received comments ranging from “Very impressive!!” and “This is very easy to use, the reading order analysis is great and I was able to immediately determine the reason for the issue” to “This finds things that no other tool can find.”
Like all software however, we also received some feedback that was not so good – specifically we discovered some incompatibilities with the WAVE toolbar. Now some would say that we did this on purpose (and I wish we were that sly) because the first beta stopped WAVE from appearing in the toolbar and stopped it from working altogether – that is however not the case. So yesterday we released Worldspace FireEyes beta 2 which has a bunch of fixes including one that makes it compatible with all the other toolbars out there.
The next beta of Worldspace FireEyes will include some major new features and we’d like your input as to which features to include. Please participate in the beta 3 features poll.
List of Improvements in Beta 2
New Features and Improvements
Keyboard shortcut (Alt+F12) to toggle Worldspace FireEyes.
‘Restore defaults’ feature: synchronize various options for a given project to their default states, found on the Settings tab.
When defining a new project, domain(s) associated with that project will be added to the Firebug activation list.
Improvements to status bar widget.
User interface improvements related to filtering issues, changes, and events shown on the Current Document and Report tabs.
Bug Fixes
Improve compatibility with other Firefox extensions, specifically ColorZilla, the Web Developer Toolbar, and the WAVE Toolbar (bugs #584, #585, #596)
Worldspace FireEyes now supports multiple projects in a single browser window
Remove Firefox zombie preferences associated with a Worldspace FireEyes project when that project is deleted (bug #567)
Fix a problem on subsequent loads or reloads of a document, where previously discovered issues would not be highlighted (bug #575)
Accessibility Enhancements
Eliminate flicker while performing color contrast analysis
Current tab is now reported correctly to AT (bug #582)
No one I know wants to create an inaccessible site. So why are so many sites inaccessible?
Our customers tell us that the two main reasons are:
Their web developers were not trained in accessibility, and
Their web developers don’t have easy-to-use tools.
At Deque, we see this double whammy — lack of training and lack of tools — to be a serious roadblock to our mission of building a barrier-free web. We would love to obliterate this roadblock. But how?
There are literally millions of web developers out there (did you know that Firebug has almost 3 million users each weekday?) and we are just a small band of accessibility fanatics trying to change the web. Trying to train developers in traditional ways would take longer than our lifetimes!
But what if we created a tool that eliminated the need for training? What if we created a tool that was just like Firebug that showed developers their accessibility issues as they were working on each page? What if the tool trained developers to make their site accessible from the get go? The more such a tool was used, the more accessible the web would become. That’s exactly what we set out to do when we started creating Worldspace FireEyes, earlier this year.
We put some of our very best developers to work on this tool and then we decided to give it all away – for free.
Today we are happy to announce that the first beta release of Worldspace FireEyes is available for free download. Let your developers know. Encourage them to use it – we know they want to create accessible sites. Tell them what we want is their feedback so we can continue to develop and improve this tool — this release is just the first of many. We are committed to making Worldspace FireEyes the tool of choice that web developers can use, without training, to create web pages that are accessible to all.
Join us in taking down all the barriers on the web – Mr. Developer – tear down this wall!
– Preety Kumar
PS : Ms Developers too – it is just the Mr Gorbachev equivalent thing..
I am very pleased to announce that the Worldspace FireEyes (this is the official name of the product we have been referring to as “FireEyes” during development) Beta 1 was released today. Although we have been doing research and design on the algorithms and techniques since 2009, we started development in earnest in February 2010. Hitting the release milestone on the head feels really good.
The first beta is being put out there to see the reaction that the community has to the world’s first dynamic accessibility evaluator. Worldspace FireEyes includes features that work well with static sites as well as some features designed specifically to address the needs of JavaScript applications.
We really wanted to push the envelope on the usability side. We think that the accessibility community has been given short shrift up until now in this department. So even though some of our static functionality exists elsewhere, we wanted to make it much easier to use with Worldspace FireEyes. We hope we have achieved this and would love to get feedback from the accessibility community on the places we have hit the mark and the places where we still have some work to do.
We also wanted to push the envelope on the dynamic side. We have features that track all events in the browser and look for patterns that indicate accessibility issues. We can detect dragging of sliders and drag and drop operations and warn the developer to make sure those features are keyboard accessible. We track focus as it changes in the browser and (combined with aria attributes) raise issues or warnings when the correct behavior does not happen. Most importantly, we do not generate false positives – or at least we tried really hard. We’d love to get feedback from the dynamic application accessibility and the WAI-ARIA communities on how we did and what we can do to improve even more.
We also wanted to push the envelope on some of the more tedious analyses such as color contrast and reading order analysis and have added features to really speed up the evaluation of a page and determining why something is not right. We can detect the correct background even when an element’s background is not in the same HTML tree as it. We can detect the correct contrast – even when the background of an element is a graphic. These are things that the Juicy Studios tool cannot do. Check out the “Details” popup on the color contrast issues…we think its cool. We’d love to know what you think.
Finally, we wanted to support the way that developers and designers work. We think that making it easy, fun and even cool to create accessible content is the only way to ensure that it gets done. Thats why we integrated Worldspace FireEyes into the most widely used development tool – Firebug. We have also built in support for project life cycles to make it easy to do the right thing.
In all of these areas, there are bunches more features we want to add soon. This is why we released it as a beta. We’d love to get your feedback on what to add too, so get engaged and stay tuned.
Web applications use content from templates and common UI elements, as a developer involved in development of a large site, you are likely only responsible for a portion of the content being displayed on the page at any one time
This demo shows how FireEyes can be used to target specific areas of an application’s UI to remediate the template, common UI elements or to focus on a specific feature or piece of content.
There are a couple of difficult issues for developers of rich Internet applications with respect to content that the application changes on the fly. One of these relates specifically to being able to triage problems with content that appears for a short period of time and then disappears again. Examples of this include search suggestions and instant message communications.
This video shows how FireEyes and Firebug can be used to identify these issues while using the application and then triage and fix these issues.
This video demonstrates some of the powerful script recording and replay capabilities by scripting the posting of a comment to Facebook and then the deletion of that comment again.
Facebook is the perfect application for showing how powerful this capability is because all of the content that Facebook displays is generated by JavaScript and element id’s are generated on the fly which means that the same content page is never the same the second time you look at it.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, March 26, 2010, RESTON, Va. –
Deque Systems announced today that it is developing a next generation web accessibility tool to help web developers find accessibility issues easily, fix them rapidly and establish the test scaffolding to ensure that their application stays accessible and compliant with web standards like Section 508 and WGAG 2.0.
Unlike older tools that don’t understand JavaScript and dynamic, event-based page content, Deque’s new Firefox/Firebug extension will help developers of rich, interactive applications ensure that their masterpieces are accessible to all.
Key features of this new web accessibility tool include:
