In my opinion WatchfireXM is a terrible product - it considers perfectly valid things to be problems, has misleading documentation and is not very intuitive. DreamweaverMX has a good but not completely thorough accessibility checking feature. Online tools will only check one page at a time.
Grant -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Geoff Deering Sent: Wednesday, 24 August 2005 5:02 PM To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: Re: [WSG] Accessibility, the possibilities Stuart Sherwood wrote: > Are any of the validation tools: Bobby, Cynthiasays, Watchfire...more > respected then the others? > > Regards, > Stuart. > You can use any of these, and all of them, but you should combine them with your own knowledge base and common sense. I also use Marc Gueury's HTML Validator(http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/). There's no tool that I trust explicitly, but if you arm yourself with some basic knowledge, then even if a tool has it's short falls or faults, and you are aware of them, you can still use what it renders correctly to assist you. Tabindex: one piece of advice, if you code tabindex, don't use intervals of 1, use something like 10, 20 or even 50; tabindex="10" tabindex="20" tabindex="50" whatever. If you have to go back and change the order or add items, it's a pain in the arse if you have to change every tabindex in the document. Tabs will naturally flow to the next highest value, it doesn't matter if the interval is 10 or 100, whatever, this allows you to insert other items later on, without having to edit the rest of the document. What I usually do is break the document down into sections, and within the section increase at intervals of 10, but when I go to a new section, jump either one hundred or even a few hundred, even a thousand. Gives breathing space... phew. But in general, if the document is well structure, and still reflects that structure when styles are turn off, the tab flow is often the same with or without coding tabindex. If that is the case, why bother coding tabindex (I realise there are exceptions like using an initial tab to set the focus/skip navigation)? ----------- Geoff ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ****************************************************** ********************************************************************** This message is intended for the addressee named and may contain privileged information or confidential information or both. If you are not the intended recipient please delete it and notify the sender. ********************************************************************** ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
