Accessibility Valet is a core Site Valet tool, designed to help ensure accessibility by analysing markup for conformance to web accessibility guidelines: specifically the WCAG and Section 508.
Version 1.2 now available for Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. Users of versions 1.0 or 1.1 please email for your free upgrade.
Version 1.1 adds a new Executive Summary feature to the capabilities of 1.0. Version 1.2 is a maintenance/bugfix release, and improves the user interface in the Windows and Server editions.
Use the Order Form, and the package will be emailed to you.
Download the installer (2.1Mb). A password for the installation will be emailed when you purchase.
Available for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris.
Single license £60; additional licenses £40 each.
AccessValet Level 1 reports are for developers. They are generated by an automatic analysis of your markup, and highlight possible accessibility problems. Warnings are shown where they arise in the (normalised) markup, and include links to the exact guidelines that are violated. The level of detail and choice of report formats makes this an exceptionally powerful developer tool.
AccessValet Level 2 reports are designed for management and QA processes. They are generated from a Level 1 report by the user checking the warnings (and, optionally, also the WCAG guidelines directly) and deciding what needs to be done. The user can, for example, override a warning and declare the guideline to be satisfied, identify repair work to satisfy the guideline, or make an informed decision not to conform to the guideline. The Level 2 report records these choices and generates an executive summary.
WebThing has been at the forefront of development and deployment of the W3C Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) since Page Valet became the world's first software to generate EARL from an automatic analysis. EARL is fully supported by AccessValet reporting at all levels.
An example of using this would be to generate a Level 2 report
report.rdf, and link to it from your page using
<link rel="accessibility" type="application/rdf+xml" href="report.rdf">.
This tells agents such as search engines and QA tools that
your page meets accessibility standards.
Instead of generating a report at Level 1, AccessValet can simply reconstruct your markup, normalised and cleaned up. The main purpose of this is to remove bogus junk inserted by defective tools. This does not affect your contents: text, images, scripts, etc are unchanged. Like Tidy it offers no guarantees, and is most useful as a first step in updating legacy or badly broken documents, or for converting between HTML and XHTML.
The core of the application is a library libhtnorm, which is supplied as a shared object libhtnorm.so (Unix/Linux) or as a dynamic library libhtnorm.dll and a COM object (Windows). The libhtnorm API reference may be made available on request.
For scripting applications, a comandline tool htnorm is provided. This is a simple frontend to libhtnorm, and includes online help for developers.