I’ve been using a Firefox extension called “Fangs”:http://www.standards-schmandards.com/fangs for testing the accessibility of some of the web pages I’m working on. It provides a visual representation of how a screen reader would render the page.

As well as the screen reader output, you also get a list of all the headings and links in the document.

For people new to accessibility and screen readers, I suggest you watch “Darren Fittler’s recent presentation”:http://www.webstock.org.nz/recordings.php at WebStock. His presentation was a huge eye-opener to both myself and many of the conference attendees. By devoting just a little effort to accessibility issues, we can make web browsing a whole lot easier to those with visual impairments. In addition, there is the added benefit of search engines being able to index your website more effectively.

We now have an RSS feed available for our blog.

Click “here”:http://www.abletech.co.nz/rss?section=blog to subscribe.

I have modified to Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox, so that it is compatible with Bon Echo, the alpha 3 version of Firefox 2. Click “here”:http://www.abletech.co.nz/file_download/3 to download.

The only change I needed to make, was to modify the _install.rdf_ file. I changed the _maxVersion_ value to 2.0.*

Able technology has released a beta version of “WriteYourSpecs”:http://www.WriteYourSpecs.com. A highly pragmatic and revolutionary tool for producing and managing your software projects documentation.

Designed by enterprise level software professionals who have witnessed first hand all the requirements, design and testing documentation problems on medium and large scale IT projects.

Able’s solution is a centralised web based system that provides all the benefits of using Word plus providing a searchable, multi-user, change notifications, and versioning for all your software related documents.

A rich web text WYSIWYG editor makes authoring documents as simple as word with spell check, table creation, image manipulation, style headings and more.

Web interfaces to version control systems to make it possible for tracing requirements and design documents directly to source code units.

Watches mean that you will automatically be notified of requirement changes that you have registered for. Conversations are recorded on the documents, meaning that they are recorded on the source unlike email. Email is used to distribute the questions with solutions automatically added to the documents comments.

Searching and Tags provide a clever way to organize, categorise and manage your requirements documents and requirements attributes.

Other features include, MS Word importer, templates, version history and difference tool, multiple project support, user management, file attachments and published versions (internal or external).

“Contact us for a test drive.”:mailto:marcus.baguley@abletech.co.nz

“Screen Shots”:write-your-specs-screen-shots

h3. Marcus Baguley

Marcus (M.Sc) has been consulting around the world for the last 14 years as a developer, designer, architect, process engineer and trainer.

021 486 048
“marcus.baguley@abletech.co.nz”:mailto:marcus.baguley@abletech.co.nz

h3. Nigel Ramsay

Nigel (M.Tech) is Able Technology’s javascript, stylesheet and html expert. He is a clean thinking OO developer with 11 years experience in design and implementation using languages such as Java and Ruby.

021 323 990
“nigel.ramsay@abletech.co.nz”:mailto:nigel.ramsay@abletech.co.nz

h3. Pam Ramsay

Pam (B.Ed) helps brings order to the chaos – thanks Pam!

021 208 7530
“pam.ramsay@abletech.co.nz”:mailto:pam.ramsay@abletech.co.nz

We’ll be meeting up with the “WellRailed”:http://groups.google.com/group/WellRailed people here in Wellington next week. For those who don’t know, WellRailed is the local Rails user group. They’re meeting “for the first time”:http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/articles/2006/05/19/wellington-rails-users-group at 6.30pm on the 30th of May 2006 – at the Syn Bar on Bond Street.

Michael gave a great “overview of Ruby on Rails”:http://www.webstock.org.nz/85.php at the recent Webstock conference here in Wellington. There was lots of positive feedback, and we’d encourge you to get in contact if you’d like to hear more.