Using the Web Developer extension for Firefox or Mozilla

Firefox is a preview of next generation browsing technology from mozilla.org. Firefox is a very sleek modern browser that features pop-up ad blocking, tabbed browsing, and integrated searching. What is really useful is the ability for people to write plug-ins or extensions that you can download that add features to the browser. One such download, called Web Developer, is extremely useful to all Web developers and it allows you to manually check pages for Web accessibility very easily.

With the Web developer installed, you can:

  1. Disable styles from the "disable" menu.
  2. Disable Javascript from the "disable" menu.
  3. Outline images without alt attributes under the "images" menu.
  4. Replace image with their alt attributes under the "images" menu.
  5. View how your links would show up to a screen ready by selecting "information", "view page information", and then "links".
  6. Check and see if a page uses headers or lists by selecting "outline" and "outline block level elements".
  7. See if a page is using any depricated elements, i.e. HTML code that is now officially obsolete. Do that by selecting "outline" and "outline depricated elements".
  8. Checks to see if there are label tags for forms and headers for tables. Select "outline" and "outline custom elements. Put "th" in for element1. Put "scope" in for element 2. Put "label" in for element3.

Once you've turned on the checks for numbers 6-8 above then you need to make them stay on as you go from page to page. To do that, go to "Options" and then make sure that "Persist Styles" is checked. Now you can go from page to page and all of the accessibility checking settings will remain active.

If you haven't look at our tutorial of performing manual checks then you should check that out. It gives you an overiew of what you are looking for when you perform manual checks. The quick procedure for manual checks on that page provides a succint list of things to look for.

Download the files

Download Firefox.

Download the Web Developer Extension.

See the complete list of downloadable Firefox extensions.

This is the end of the tutorial.

Return to the Evaluation page.