Overview

Screen shot of AInspector Sidebar open on the University of Illinois home page

AInspector for Firefox 2.2.1 Released!

As always AInspector for Firefox is open source and free for anyone to use.

Importance of the Firefox Sidebar

The use of the Firefox Sidebar is an important feature not available in the Chrome browser. Once the sidebar is open, it remains open, automatically updating the evaluation as you select links or move to other tabs. The evaluation can optionally be delayed to allow you to change the state of a web application (e.g. open a menu) and get an evaluation on the new state of the page.

Major New Features

  • Export button in all views (Summary, Rule Results, Element Results) for saving evaluation results in either CSV or JSON file formats.
  • Element results view now provides significantly more detailed information on a particular element.
  • Copy button for copying information in the Rule or Element views to the clipboard.
  • Keyboard shortcuts for Back, View, Export, Rerun and Copy buttons.
  • Text in the Rule or Element views is now “selectable” for copying to the clipboard.

Try them out and let us know what you think!

Other Changes

  • Improved element highlight feature in Element Results view.
  • Improved keyboard focus styling indicator to support high contrast modes.
  • Renamed extension from “AInspector WCAG” to “AInspector for Firefox”.
  • Removed ARIA Transitional ruleset from the options, since the reduced requirements are no longer relevant to modern web design. This change simplifies the user interface.

Purpose

The purpose of AInspector is to help people understand the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). To accomplish this, it provides detailed evaluation data that not only indicate pass or fail results for some rules, but also whether manual checking is needed for certain other rules that cannot be programmatically evaluated.

AInspector is different from other tools in the number of rules that result in manual checking.  Manual checks are important to help people understand that there is more to accessibility requirements than can be understood by only focusing on rules that either pass or fail, and that even if there are no failing rules there are additional requirements that need to be understood to ensure accessibility.

For people learning about accessibility, AInspector gives them an understanding of the accessibility considerations needed for a specific web page. For experienced accessibility professionals, it helps them ensure they have crossed their t’s and dotted their i’s on accessibility.

Privacy and Data Collection

AInspector for Firefox does not collect, communicate or save any information on users, browsing history or the websites it analyzes for accessibility.

How to Report an Issue

If you find a problem or inconsistency in AInspector, we, the developers, want to know about it. You can file a new issue by using the AInspector GitHub repository Issues feature.