Accessibility Tools - An update

Many long-term Accessify readers will know that the reason this web site exists is basically down to the tools that are featured here (the site became a container for the various tools that I created a few years ago). In recent times, though, the site has primarily been a source of accessibility news and I suspect that readers may have forgotten that these tools exist or never knew about them in the first place (particularly if you are reading through an RSS feed), so I thought it was about time to send out a reminder, particularly as one of the tools that was seemingly lost for good (during the ASP-to-PHP conversion) has been revived …

The accessible table builder source code went on holiday for a while, liked it and decided never to return. But it’s back - thanks to Struan King who was missing the tool and offered to rebuild it from scratch (and from memory of how the old version worked).

How does it work?

It’s a wizard-based approach - it asks you how many columns, rows, whether the first columns is a header too and requests other accessibility -related information such as caption, summary and whether you want to use scope attribute or headers and ids. In the end you have a table - the HTML and the CSS - that contains all the necessary markup required.

So, why not give it a try (and be sure to report any problems you have). It’s free, as in beer, folks (and if you know where I can find some actual free beer, let me know that too)

Try out the accessible table builder here »

Other acccessibility and developer tools

This is the ‘reminder’ part of this note. There have been a number of bugs reported on some of the tools that I’ve been sitting on for far too long, but I believe I’ve fixed most of them now. It would be great if you could take a look at some of these tools below, see if they work for you, and if they do recommend them to your friends, loved ones and possibly your gran; she’d love it.

You can report bugs with any of the tools here (but please be sure to state what tool the fault relates to).

• Accessibility Tools
  • Accessible Form Builder - A simple but very quick way of putting together a form that uses either CSS or table for layout, automatically creates label elements and the associated for and id atttributes, as well as (optional) title attributes for each text field. It’s as simple as entering a list of fields that need to be captured and hitting return.
  • Form Element Generator - Build individual form elements that are accessible (requires JavaScript to work). Could be used after creating the form above to address fields that are not straightforward text inputs.
  • Pop-up Window Generator - Create pop-ups that are accessible and search engine-friendly. Note: this tool is going to get a revamp very soon, such that inline event handlers are not used. So, don’t flame me, all ye DOM scripters!
  • Favelets - Little pieces of JavaScript that can be saved as favourites in Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Opera. You may find these useful for checking features of a page (for example, what links are present, images missing alt attributes etc
• General Developer Tools
  • Yes/No List creator - It’s a tool for quickly generating accessible, XHTML-compliant yes/no radio button choices from a list
  • Insta-Select - An easy XHTML-compliant select list generator (paste in your list and out comes the select with relevent option elements and value attributes)
  • List-o-matic - Create CSS-styled navigation blocks based on unordered list
  • items.
  • Acrobot - converts all your acronyms/abbreviations using the and tag
  • HTML to JavaScript Convertor - Similar to Response.Right, this tool takes your markup and converts it to a series of document.write() statements that you can use in a block of JavaScript.
  • XFN (XHTML Friends Network) Link Creator - Build up XFN-friendly links for copying/pasting into a blog-roll or navigation menu.
  • Response.Right - Save time converting large blocks of text/HTML to server-side write statements (such as PHP echo or ASP response.write) with this handy convertor.
  • Quick Escape - Converts HTML to escaped characters suitable for pasting into form textarea inputs.