Patrick Lauke’s Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility with Firefox, published in the latest issue of Ariadne, is a wonderful, in-depth look at how to use Chris Pederick’s Web Developer toolbar to evaluate sites against a number of WCAG 1.0 checkpoints.
You can’t catch all the accessibility problems, but Patrick’s approach is great for handling all of the problems that are inside the angle brackets in your documents. And if you leave some of these features on all the time, you can recoil in horror at sites you may not have realized are still put together 90’s-era tag soup or deeply-nested layout tables. (Select “Outline Tables” and “Outline custom elements” with <font> to see what I mean.)
And now, time for me to take a page from Ian’s book, slip out of the country, and observe radio silence for a while.