Accessibility testing of scripts.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 provide various guidelines which relate to script, there are no tools which aid testing of how well script follows these guidelines, this is an attempt to overcome this.

To use this software, you need to be running windows 95 or later o/s, and be running IE5 or better (only currently tested on IE5.5sp2), you also need to install ScriptX an ActiveX control from Meadroid it actually is for printing from IE, but it gives the ability to scripts to connect to events from applications, this allows me to use javascript to monitor javascript.

To use Snork you need to download a zipfile containing the program snork.wsf and the datafile snorkdata.xml.

Running snork.wsf, will open a copy of Internet Explorer, you then navigate this to the url you wish to test (or give it as a parameter when starting the script.) you can then use the page, but no links will take you from the page. To get the actual report you enter "process:report" in the location bar of the browser, you can also validate the page using the XML validator from Site Valet with the command "process:validate". These urls are added to a "floating" bar at the top of the page.

There is an example page (you probably don't want to visit this with script enabled/capable.) and the report which is generated by this page for those of you who wish to see what the tool does without downloading/testing it yourself.

Issues currently tested to some extent:

There are a great many things wrong with the script, there's currently no support for frames, iframes etc. There's the obvious reliance on Internet Explorer for both the HTML and javascript processing (although it could be authored so that some of the proprietary script/DOM elements were removed for the testing, or just warned of). My own quick interpretation is likely wrong or at best sub-optimal, this release is more for illustrating the techniques and getting some input from other interested parties.

The source is obviously provided (it's script) please let me know of any improvements you do make, so they can be incorperated into as complete as possible tool, if there's interest I'll set up a mailing list for it, until then email me jim@jibbering.com

It may be appropriate to extend the tool beyond just script, but as there are already tools that do this, without the reliance on IE's parser it's probably not worthwhile until the script portions are complete and the tool is seen as useful.

The approach of modifying IE used here, can also be used to great effect to modify its behaviour as a User Agent, indeed it's possible to overcome the vast majority of the weaknesses in IE with assistive technologies in the WAI UA implementation report, Snufkin is an example of this, not from the view of any particular accessibilty technology though.

Any suggestions, requests, features, bugs please get in touch by email jim@jibbering.com, Jibbering.com