WebAIM’s 15th Birthday, WAVE Chrome Extension, and Free API Access

Happy Birthday WebAIM!

This month WebAIM celebrates its 15th birthday. WebAIM began in October 1999 as a small, grant-funded project with a mission to increase awareness of web accessibility. Nobody at the time envisioned what it would evolve into. We’ve been involved in many different grant and research projects over the years, and have slowly transitioned to focus more on providing consultation services and training.

Our staff has grown, changed, and evolved – and we’ve had dozens of student workers come through WebAIM’s doors and then leave with a better understanding of web accessibility. In the coming months we’ll be highlighting several current and former WebAIM staff.

15 years after beginning, WebAIM’s primary mission is still to increase awareness of web accessibility. We look forward to another 15 years of serving the community with free information, resources, and tools, and by providing value to clients through web accessibility expertise and services. In addition to the exciting announcements below, WebAIM will be providing many other new and exciting updates as we commemorate our 15th birthday.

WAVE Chrome Extension

To celebrate our birthday, we’re happy to announce the beta release of the WAVE Chrome Extension. You can install the free Chrome Extension at the Chrome Web Store.

We remind you that this is a beta release. We know there are some bugs and we will work to resolve them in the coming weeks. Please let us know if you find bugs or have recommendations.

In the near future we will be updating the Firefox extension to include the new WAVE functionality present in the Chrome extension and online at http://wave.webaim.org/.

Free WAVE API Subscriptions

As another gift to the community, WebAIM is providing free access to the WAVE online API service until the end of 2014. Simply register for an account and you’ll be given 2500 free credits – a $75 value. The free credits expire on January 1.

A new feature of the WAVE API is that the page is evaluated after JavaScript and CSS have been applied to the page. This allows a much more accurate representation of end user accessibility.