Today we bring you an interview with Helen Burgess, chairperson of the Australian Web Awards.  If you would like to learn more about the Australian web awards, please visit their website: http://www.webawards.com.au/ Deque: Could you give us a brief description of Australian Web Awards? Helen: The Australian Web Awards seek to showcase Australian-grown talent by recognising outstanding web design and development by businesses and individuals to the Australian Web Industry. What criteria are the Australian Web Awards based on? The awards are based on 2 stages. The 1st stage is based on validation criteria. The criteria for this is: W3C mark-up validation using W3Clove.org W3C CSS validation Link checking A first pass Accessibility check using WAVE web page load testing using webpagetest.org The errors and warnings from the criteria above are given a score and the combined total gives us an idea of what sites should go onto the second stage. [...] → Continue Reading Interview with Helen Burgess from the Australian Web Awards

Deque Systems announced a breakthrough in web accessibility solutions by releasing a first-of-its-kind suite of add-ins, ribbon extensions, and Web Parts for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 tools that ensure Section 508 compliance. This makes Deque the first company to produce a suite of tools that enable SharePoint users to avoid producing the host of compliance problems they normally create during web development activities. Until now, SharePoint users did not have tools that would let them create Section 508 compliant web content prior to publishing, leaving them to deal with web accessibility as a post-publication issue. Deque, a Microsoft Gold certified developer, created the suite of add-ins, ribbon extensions, and Web Parts for SharePoint to solve this problem at its root cause. With the Deque solution at their fingertips, content creators can now engage in “preventive authoring”, which is the highest industry best practice for accessible web development activities and workflow management. [...] → Continue Reading Deque Systems, a Microsoft Gold Certified Development Partner, Releases a First-Of-Its-Kind, Web Accessibility Solution for SharePoint

Deque Systems announced the global launch of Worldspace™ FireEyes™, an unprecedented, next generation Web accessibility tool that ensures both static and dynamic content within a web portfolio are compliant with accessibility standards such as Section 508, WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0. Developers face real problems trying to make dynamic websites and applications, like Facebook, accessible to everyone. The current generation of tools on the market don’t work with JavaScript or dynamic, event-based page content. FireEyes enables developers of rich, interactive sites and applications ensure their creations are accessible to everyone. FireEyes is an easy-to-use plug-in that is fully integrated with one of the most popular and powerful Web development tools, FireBug, a Firefox extension. FireEyes works well with static sites plus includes features specifically designed to address the needs of dynamically updating content. It is the only tool on the market that is fully JavaScript aware that enables developers to [...] → Continue Reading Deque Releases Worldspace FireEyes, a NextGen Web Accessibility Tool Free to Developer Community

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.

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 [...] → Continue Reading Worldspace FireEyes Beta 2 Released

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, [...] → Continue Reading Worldspace FireEyes Beta 1 Released

Product Description Download FireEyes Training Videos FAQ Tutorial Comments Page This page has an open comments section where you can post comments, suggestions and questions about Worldspace FireEyes

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: Integration with Firefox/Firebug Browser content visually marked-up to make the impact of accessibility issues visible to developers without disabilities Script tab for editing, playing, testing, and replaying recorded scripts Options for choosing which web standards will be included in tests Reporting for current document events and violations Transcript of all pages visited in a [...] → Continue Reading Deque Systems Announces New Web Accessibility Plugin for Firefox

This ain’t your older brother’s web any more Web pages used to be relatively static affairs, some were generated by server side applications, some stored in content management systems. But because of the browser wars, developers were loathe to use too much JavaScript for fear of having products that would only work for half of their users. Of course, where there is a problem or a void, something will appear to fill it and JavaScript frameworks like Scriptaculous, jQuery and Dojo appeared that made it easy to develop cross-platform rich applications. The result of this is that it is now more common to encounter web sites that have JavaScript than web sites that have no JavaScript and there are many popular rich applications like Facebook that are written almost entirely in JavaScript. The result of this is that whereas it used to be possible to find the totality of a [...] → Continue Reading Next Generation Web Accessibility Tools are Critically Needed