Web Accessible Tool Bars

Among one of the most common web tool bar Firebug, there are a lot of other tool bars that can aid a web developer with some insight for web accessibility.
What am I talking about?

I'm saying that there are more people other than "normal" people that use the internet. I'm talking about users with disabilities such as blindness. These users do not see websites as we do with sparkling colors and flying text following the cursor or any other kind of internet wizardry. To these users, our web pages are either read to them aloud by a screen reader or a braile board.

This means they will only know what's there by text or alt text. Alt text can go as far from images to form labels.

Do image spacers need alt text too?

They sure do! That way the screen reader knows to skip over it when it shows an empty string (" ").
Another big "no-no" for accessibility is layout tables. Come on, people! CSS is your friend! The only thing that should be in a table is data. Otherwise the screen reader has to read out every cell even though it may not contain any linear content. Plus, tables tend to get nested and ugly and then the screen reader is reading out garbage. This makes navigating pages for those who cant see the page very frustrating and confusing.

One way the screen readers navigate is by jumping to headers by hierarchy. This means < h1> should be reserved for the main page topic header and < h2> through < h6> be used for other sub topics within the page.

This is only some of the main issues of accessibility, but there are a lot more.

To help aide yourself to constructing accessible pages you can install these tool bars:

WAVE Toolbar - This is the number one tool bar I recommend for checking for web accessibility. All you have to do is navigate to your web site, select the Errors, Features.. button, and view all the green (good), yellow (mediocre), and red (bad) images describing your pages accessibility points.

Web Developer - This tool bar will allow you to view your page's metadata, disable CSS, disable cookies, and lots more. This tool bar is a must for testing your site.

For IE users...
WAT 2.0 - This toolbar will do similar operations as Web Developer.

For those who care, I recommend to start making your pages accessible and to install these toolbars that are applicable. A downside to making your site accessible means no flash, and pretty basic looking. Although...with CSS and jquery you should be able to make some nifty effects.