mediajunk

The National Information and Library Service (NILS), Australia, have created a wonderful little toolbar that checks various aspects of a web page’s usability and accessibility. The toolbar is small (451kb) and free to download. Note: The accessibility toolbar is primarily intended for web page designers and developers – it may not interest "everyday" web users. Some of the features I like on the toolbar are single-click ways to:

• Resize your browser to each of the standard monitor sizes (600x800, etc.) on a single click.
• View what a web page looks like without CSS.
• View a web page in greyscale (gives some idea of how a colour-blind user might see it)
• Highlight various structural elements (headings, etc.)
• Provide a colour palette of all the html colours used on the page, along with corresponding hexadecimal code -- useful if you want to, uh, “borrow” a colour scheme from someone else’s site ;)
• Validate the HTML in the page in various ways, against a range of standards.
• View the page weight (in kb) and download speed (different speeds listed for different internet connection types).

... and, as they say, much, much more. Of course, you won’t want to use the toolbar during regular surfing -- but you can simply turn it off (in IE, go to view > toolbars). All in all, an impressive, feature-rich toolbar. Well done NILS! ***** Speaking of useful downloads, something else I came across this week was ieSpell, a spell-checker for Internet Explorer. This wee -- but enormously useful -- plugin for IE lets you check the spelling of anything you type into an input box. Like comments, for example ;) If only I’d discovered ieSpell earlier -- I used to type a lot of the entries to this blog directly into Movable Type until, after consistently poor spelling and typos, I took to typing them in MS Word, then cutting and pasting. Now I can go back to direct MT input! It’s the little things that make such a big difference, sigh…