Worldspace FireEyes F.A.Q.
- Release and Installation
- What is the current release status of Worldspace FireEyes?
- Worldspace FireEyes is currently in beta release status. We plan to have multiple beta releases prior to the first production release.
- Can we use the product for real projects?
- Yes. The designation of beta is being used because some of the desired features have not yet been implemented and because we anticipate that issues will be discovered by the community that we did not test-for in our in-house testing.
- Is Worldspace FireEyes accessible?
- Yes it is fully accessible, but this requires Firebug’s accessibility enhancements option to be enabled.
- How do I enable Firebug’s accessibility enhancements?
- Firebug contains various accessibility enhancements that improve its keyboard accessibility, but these are turned off by default. To determine whether accessibility enhancements are turned on, open the Firefox menu bar, under the Tools menu, navigate to Firebug, then Options. If ‘Enable Accessibility Enhancements’ is checked, then the enhancements are active. The Firebug Wiki contains a description of the accessibility enhancements in Firebug, and how they can be used and customized. Worldspace FireEyes will ensure that Firebug is running with these accessibility enhancements turned on, but we recommend that users of AT set this option themselves for the best possible first-run experience, since they will need to navigate to the Worldspace FireEyes tab within Firebug in order to get started with the software.
- What are the software dependencies for Worldspace FireEyes?
- Worldspace FireEyes requires Firefox 3.5.3 or higher and Firebug 1.5.3 or higher. It also requires Java 1.5 to be installed and enabled in the browser.
- If the wrong version of Firebug is installed what will happen?
- If the version of Firebug is earlier than 1.5.3, then the Worldspace FireEyes add-on will be displayed as “dependencies required” in the Firefox add-ons list. The Worldspace FireEyes user interface will not appear inside the Firebug plugin.
- If Java is not enabled correctly, what will happen?
- If Java is not enabled, or if the wrong version of Java is installed, then the initialization of Worldspace FireEyes will fail and this will cause the initialization of Firebug to fail. The result of this is that the Firebug user interface will not display correctly and Firebug will not be usable. This can be corrected by installing and/or enabling the correct Java plugin version. Worldspace FireEyes will display a message when it cannot initialize its Java components correctly, allowing you to identify when this situation exists.
- What happens if I cannot install the correct Java version?
- If you cannot install or enable the correct Java version and your IT administrators are not able to do this on your behalf, then you should uninstall Worldspace FireEyes so that you can continue to use Firebug.
- Is there a version of Worldspace FireEyes for Internet Explorer, Google Chrome or Safari?
- No. The only browser currently supported by both Firebug and Worldspace FireEyes is Firefox. We are investigating creating a version of the software for other browsers.
- What operating systems has Worldspace FireEyes been tested on?
- Worldspace FireEyes has been tested on Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6, Windows XP and Windows 7. It should work on any operating system on which Firefox and Firebug work, and where a Java plugin or runtime environment for Firefox is available. Please report issues that you encounter on other platforms.
- Features
- Which standards does Worldspace FireEyes support?
- Worldspace FireEyes currently supports WCAG 1 (Priorities 1, 2 and 3), WCAG 2 (levels A and AA), section 508 and some dynamic rules that test for WAI-ARIA compliance.
- Does Worldspace FireEyes have support for static pages?
- Yes. Worldspace FireEyes evaluates both static and dynamic web sites and applications. It does the analysis by monitoring all of the browser events including the initial “load” event. If you want to control the points at which the analysis is done, you can turn off the “Automatic” analysis and use the “Now” button to analyze static pages.
- Does Worldspace FireEyes support analyzing multiple pages or a whole site?
- Yes. When you have Automatic analysis turned on, then every page you visit will be analyzed and the results will be accumulated in the “Report” tab. The “Current Document” tab will only display the results for the page you are currently viewing in the browser.
- Can you export the results of an analysis?
- Yes. There is an export button on both the “Report” and the “Current Document” tabs. That button will export the issues currently displayed on that tab. The resulting report is in “Tab Separated Variable” format and can be imported into Excel for manipulation and evaluation.
- Can Worldspace FireEyes support the remediation of static issues?
- Yes. By editing the content of the page using the Firebug “edit” features, you can change the HTML structure. Clicking the “retest” button on an issue will evaluate the HTML to see whether the issue is still present. If the issue has been remediated, the issue will be marked as remediated in the report and the modified HTML for the element will be exported when the report is exported.
- Does Worldspace FireEyes support the remediation of dynamic issues?
- Yes. Using the event “Record” feature, you can create scripts that will reproduce dynamic issues. These scripts can be saved, loaded and re-run. If “analyze while replaying” is selected, the analysis will be done during replay and this will validate whether issues still exist.
- Can the scripts be shared with other developers?
- We are planning to add script sharing capabilities to the product in the near future.
- What does the “Freeze” button do?
- The freeze button stops all user events from being delivered to the browser. This is useful for exploring interim browser states using Firebug’s HTML inspect functionality where the inspect functionality would otherwise cause the state of the browser to change. It is most useful in conjunction with script replay as this allows you to toggle “freeze” on without having your mouse travel over the browser window potentially triggering mouse move, mouseover and mouseout events or changing the focus of the browser.
- What are the blue- and green-striped areas that appear in the browser?
- The green- and blue-striped areas represent accessibility issues and are toggled on and off by checking or un-checking the “highlight” checkbox. They are intended only for sighted users and perform two functions: firstly they stop the sighted user from interacting with the web page, thereby simulating the usability that a user of AT would have; and secondly, they allow the sighted user to visually locate the element related to an issue. AT users can get this same information by firstly interacting with the web page using the AT; and secondly by clicking the “Inspect” button to view the HTML related to the issue in the Firebug HTML inspector.
- Worldspace FireEyes is capturing too many changes and events and they are overwhelming me. What can I do?
- There are a couple of reasons why Worldspace FireEyes might capture many events. Firstly, you might have the event recording options, which can be viewed and changed on the “Settings” tab set to record very chatty events such as mouse movements. By turning these off, you can reduce the amount of information captured and displayed by Worldspace FireEyes; secondly, your web application might be generating lots of changes in the document through the use of JavaScript. You can use the “Filter” button to filter out the changes and events so that they do not appear in the report; thirdly, you can turn off event recording altogether by un-checking the “Record” checkbox.
- What is a project?
- Developers often have to work on multiple applications of web sites and often need or want different settings for each of these sites. The projects feature allows you to specify the domains that belong to your project (production, Q.A. and your private sandbox) so that you can have one set of settings for each project. It also allows you to record a script on your sandbox and replay it in your production environment to determine whether the same issues occur in both environments. This can be very useful for QA engineers and developers.
- Why do you have the “Color” and the “Order” buttons?
- In order to accurately perform color contrast and reading order analysis, Worldspace FireEyes has to send events to the browser and perform DOM manipulations. In order to avoid an infinite loop of analysis when “automatic” analysis is turned on, the advanced versions of these tests have been placed inside a button. Pressing this button will disable the automatic analysis while the color or reading order analysis is taking place and the re-enable it once completed.
- Why does the display sometimes change during reading order analysis?
- Worldspace FireEyes does a two pass analysis on the reading order. The first pass is with CSS enabled and the second pass is with CSS disabled. When the CSS is disabled, the browser will sometimes redraw the document before the analysis begins, this will result in the display of the page changing.
- Known Issues
- When using Worldspace FireEyes on Windows and using multiple Firefox windows, the Java initialization for the second and sunsequent windows will fail causing the Worldspace FireEyes analysis code to become inactive. The workaround for this is to use multiple browser tabs rather than multiple browser windows (bug #581).
- Sometimes, Firefox’s getComputedStyle implementation does not correctly return the value of the “display” attribute. This results in issues being generated for elements that are not supposed to be displayed (
display: none). This occurs most commonly with the color contrast analysis because the developer of the page has (understandably) not paid attention to the color or background of an element that is actually not visible (bug #505).
- When replayed individually, resize events can be re-recorded (bug #486)
- When Worldspace FireEyes is open in two tabs, the “Automatic”, “Record” and “Highlight” checkboxes on all three tabs will be synchronized. If the tabs are associated with separate projects, this can lead to a mismatch between the display of the check box state and the actual state maintained internally by Worldspace FireEyes for that project. The workaround is to work in different browser windows when working on multiple projects simultaneously (bug #519).
- AT currently does not treat tables in a Firefox extension the same way that it does when that table is inside the browser window. As a result, the AT does not read out the table header associations for the Worldspace FireEyes current document, report and script tabs. It also means that some of the table cells are inaccessible. All of the information displayed in the report and current document tabs can be accessed through the “details” button by AT users (bug #557).
- Worldspace FireEyes will generate a false positive violation related to nested headers if a header tag (h1, h2, h3, h4…) has a self closing tag like <br> or <img> inside it (bug #565).
- Issues Fixed Since the Last Build
- On deeply nested pages, the color contrast analysis can fail with a “too much recursion” error (bug #583).
- 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)
- Reduce flicker while performing color contrast analysis
- Current tab is now reported correctly to AT (bug #582)
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