Area highlighter trick
This feature - mouse pointer highlighting - was not available in the "original" Windows XP. At least, I've never seen it in the versions I had.
But I found it quite useful lately. It does not help in finding bugs, but it greatly helps with screen demos and walkthroughs.
How it works.
Once enabled, hitting Control produces flashing circles at mouse pointer's location.
Total Validator
Total Validator provides the following main features:
- A parser that validates the basic construction of your pages
- True HTML validation against the W3C Markup Specifications or ISO/IEC definition using the published DTDs and standards: (2.0, 3.2, 4.0, 4.01, 5, ISO/IEC, XHTML 1.0, 1.1 and 5, XHTML Basic 1.0, 1.1, (X)HTML+RDFa, XHTML-Print)
- An accessibility validator that validates against the W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines (1.0 and 2.0) and US Section 508 Standard
- A broken links validator that checks each page for broken links
- A spelling validator that spell checks the content of your pages (English, French, Italian, Spanish, German)
- Snapshots (screenshots) of your pages in different browsers, on different platforms, at different resolutions
- A desktop tool so you can validate pages before you publish, and pages behind firewalls
Here are results generated after our home page validation.
Reading effectiveness tool
Many times, when testing websites, we forget about the static content of the site. Here is a simple tool that applies some simple heuristics to help gauge the effectiveness of the content on your site. Even if you don't end up using it, as you read through it you can get some ideas for how to make content more accessible.
Web Accessibility Tools
UX Booth recently did a posting on tools that help with web accessibility. I ran my personal website through all of the tools and found issues. (Special joy.) I particularly found the image analyzer from Juicy Studio to be quite informative. They have some other tools and links available on their website.
