We’re very excited to announce the launch of the newly updated beta version of WAVE version 5. Please check it out at http://five.wave.webaim.org/.
We will be participating in a free webinar on Tuesday, October 9th at 11am Pacific time (2pm Eastern) to share details on these new updates and the future of WAVE. Details are available at http://www.ada-audio.org/Webinar/AccessibleTechnology/Schedule/
We want WAVE to be the most powerful and easiest-to-use web accessibility evaluation tool available, and this release is a significant update that represents several years of effort and thought. After some testing and a few feature and performance enhancements are completed, this version will soon replace the main version of WAVE found at http://wave.webaim.org/
Notable changes:
- There is now a sidebar that allows you to dynamically interact with WAVE report.
- Greatly improved processing logic to ensure that WAVE gives you useful and accurate feedback about actual end-user accessibility issues.
- Many new WAVE icons to give you feedback on additional aspects of web accessibility, including links that are missing focus indicators, missing document language, possible table captions, HTML5 and ARIA markup, and much more.
- Color contrast checking based on WCAG 2.0 Level AA, and some nifty tools to preview and modify contrast.
- Ability to filter results to WCAG AA, WCAG A, and Section 508 guidelines.
- A code panel so you can see the underlying markup of your page as you evaluate it.
- Significantly improved documentation so you can learn about web accessibility as you use WAVE.
- Much more!
We would love to hear your feedback on WAVE5. Please leave a comment below, or select the “Feedback” link in WAVE.
In the coming weeks and months we will be releasing updated WAVE toolbars, a WAVE API, and other WAVE tools.
Looking forward to the Webinar today, Jared. A bunch of the web designers from the state of MO will be listening in!
That is great news! Is the toolbar going to be re-released too?
Fantastic! I really like how you can click on an alert and know exactly what’s going on. It’s much clearer and overall easier to use. Nice work.
Mike-
Yes, updated toolbars are being worked on now.
I think the information supplied by the validator is excellent.
Surely it is possible to provide this information in some form with JavaScript disabled though – even if it isn’t as highly interactive.
Steve-
The toolbar will allow you to conduct evaluations on your own system with or without JavaScript enabled. The API will also allow you to collect the accessibility data.
The tool looks amazing. I’ll test it better soon.
Is it still possible to access the webinar?
As with the previous version, I volunteer for spanish translation.
Nestor-
I’m not sure if the EASI webinar archives are available, but you could e-mail them to find out. We’ll be doing another webinar next week and I’ve updated the post above with details. And thank you for your offer to do Spanish translation. We have quite a bit of work to get to a point where we’ll be ready for translations, but we have you on the list.
Great Jared. Count me in.
I’ll mail EASI about the webinar archive also.
Hi! Love your toolbar and using everyday. Count me in as translator for Polish version!
Volunteer for the translation to the Czech language is here 😉
It would be really useful if there was a way to provide a keyword or attribute to elements that are flagged as a warning that says, in essence, I have evaluated his warning and it is ok, do not show this warning again. For example, in some
script elements or hidden elements that are known to be non-impacting.
It would also be good to have a setting to turn off all green or good icons, so that the content shows up.
By combining these two features, a developer can continue to work on webpages until there are no longer any wave icons present, signifying a clean page from a WAVE perspective.
Great job on the toolbar, it is very helpful!