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Tools

Accessibility Tools

• aDesigner - ibm.com "The aDesigner is a disability simulator that helps Web designers ensure that their pages are accessible and usable by the visually impaired." It can check color contrast, whether or not font sizes can be changed by users and whether alt attributes for non-text elements are appropriate. It can also check your page for World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines compliance (WCAG). Platforms: Windows 2000; Windows XP.
• A-Prompt (Accessibility Prompt) - A tool developed to assist Web authors in improving the accessibility and usability of HTML documents. It is made available through a joint collaboration between the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto and the TRACE Center at the University of Wisconsin.
• ATutor - "ATutor is an Open Source Web-based Learning Content Management System (LCMS) designed with accessibility and adaptability in mind. Administrators can install or update ATutor in minutes, and develop custom templates to give ATutor a new look. Educators can quickly assemble, package, and redistribute Web-based instructional content, easily retrieve and import prepackaged content, and conduct their courses online. Students learn in an adaptive learning environment."
  • ATalker add-on for ATutor - "ATalker is a Web-based text-to-speech add-on for ATutor, based on the Festival text-to-speech system. Using synthesized speech, ATalker can read text out loud over the Web. With the ATalker Theme installed, the ATutor interface and feedback messages can be read out loud. ATalker can currently produce English and Spanish voices. The potential for many other languages is available through the Mbrola Project."
• Accessible Form Builder - Ian Lloyd. "A new version of the form builder tool, this time with more advanced features, including the option of selecting what type of input you need."
• Accessible Form Creator - HiSoftware
• Form Element Generator - Ian Lloyd. "Lets you easily build individual form elements that are accessible."
• Accessible Table Builder - Ian Lloyd. "Create an accessible table using scope, header and id attributes using a wizard to guide you through the process".
• Accessibility Probe (AccProbe) - eclipse. "The Accessibility Probe is a standalone, Eclipse Rich-Client Product (RCP) application that provides a view of the Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) or IAccessible2 hierarchy of a currently running application or rendered document and of the properties of the accessible objects of that application or document. It can also serve as an event monitor for tracking the events fired by these accessible objects. It is meant to combine the functionality of tools like Microsoft's Inspect32, AccExplore, and AccEvent into one easy-to-use application for accessibility testing and debugging."
• Accessibility Extension Examining WAI-ARIA - Gez Lemon. " ...this Firefox extension examines WAI-ARIA's Live Regions (this functionality will eventually be incorporated into a WAT for Firefox extension). The live regions extension is currently available in a toolbar with the latest versions of the colour contrast analyser and table inspector extensions. Updates include not only Landmark Roles but all WAI-ARIA Roles and all WAI-ARIA Properties.
• Acrobot - Ian Lloyd. "converts all your acronyms/abbreviations using the <acronym> and <abbr> tag".
• Adaptive Technology Resource Cente (ATRC) Accessibility Checker - the Adaptive Technology Resource Center "This is an experimental service that is provided by the Adaptive Technology Resource Center (ATRC) at the University Of Toronto. It is a model system that demonstrates how web pages may be checked for accessibility problems. The accessibility checks in this system are based upon the proposed Open Accessibility Checks which are under development. Evaluations produced by this software program are not yet valid - this is still an experimental service."
• Bobby - A discontinued free/online accessiblility tool.
  • WatchFire Flips The Bird - Jason Lefkowitz
• Captioning Video with 'World Caption' - University of Wisconsin
• CC for Flash - National Center for Accessible Media. "NCAM has developed a Flash component that can be used to display captions in a Flash video player. These captions are read from external files formatted in the W3C's DFXP format which can be created with MAGpie, NCAM's free captioning application. CC for Flash also imports Apple's QTtext format for use within the application. QTtext files can be created by professional caption authoring tools, or as an output from CaptionKeeper or MAGpie. Any content can display captions in Flash using the CC for Flash component with a QTtext file or a DFXP file."
• Clear Language and Effectiveness Tool - Based on the Simple Measure Of Gobbledegook (SMOG) readability formula and developed by the Toronto East End Literacy Project. This tool asks a series of questions then using client-side scripting calculates a reading level.
• CLiCk, Speak - Charles L. Chen. "CLiCk, Speak is an open source, freely available extension for the Firefox web browser. It is part of the CLC-4-TTS Suite of products, it features a mouse driven interface, and it reads web pages - hence its name. Unlike Fire Vox which is designed for visually impaired users, CLiCk, Speak is designed for sighted users who want text-to-speech functionality. It doesn't identify elements or announce events - two features that are very important for visually impaired users but very annoying for sighted users. It also has a simplified, mouse driven interface that is designed to be easy for users familiar with point-and-click graphical user interfaces. Like Fire Vox, CLiCk, Speak works on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux; and Fire Vox has multilingual support, making it great for users who are trying to learn a foreign language and need to hear foreign language web sites read out to them for practice."
• Complex Table Inspector favelet - Gez Lemon. Gez has written a favelet that reveals accessibility attributes for complex tables.
  • Table Inspector Mozilla/Firefox Extension - Gez Lemon
• Cynthia - HiSoftware, ICDRI and The Internet Society Disability Chapter. "Cynthia is a web content accessibility validation solution, it is designed to identify errors in design related to Section 508 standards and the W3C WCAG guidelines. It is also designed to educate web site developers in the development of Web Based content so that is accessible to all."
• Deque Ramp Personal Edition Program: First Step to 'One Accessible World' - Deque. "'One Accessible World' is designed to promote accessibility for information technology around the world. We are extremely proud to roll out this free, no cost, program to people committed to World Wide Web accessibility outreach. Below you will find an overview of the program, and how to gain access to this group...Who Qualifies: Assistive Technology labs, Educational institutions, Non-profits, Students of web accessibility, Web accessibility trainers...One-time registration is necessary before you can download your free copy of Deque's Ramp PE, the Web accessibility evaluation software."
• Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility - Web Accessibility Initiative
• Fangs: The Firefox Screen Reader Emulator Extension - Joseph Lindsay. "I get a lot of questions on how certain pages appear in a screen reader. That is why I have started developing a Mozilla Firefox extension that emulates the output of a modern screen reader." Joseph's Fangs Blog Post:.
• Firefox Web Browser - Besides being a great browser, firefox has many useful add-ons/extensions like:
  • Aardvark - "The Aardvark Firefox extension is a tool for web developers/designers as well as casual users."
  • Accessibility Extensions for Mozilla/Firefox - Center for Instructional Technology Accessibility. "The Mozilla/Firefox Accessibility Extension makes it easier for people with disabilities to view and navigate web content. A toolbar provides easy access to navigation, styling, and keyboard enhancement functionality. Developers can use the extension to check their structural markup from the browser window to verify that it matches the page content. The Accessibility Extension helps authors to meet these kinds of accessibility practices that are so important for the browsing experience of all users and vital to those with special needs."
  • Adobe's Accessibility Resource Center - Here you can download an accessibility kit, accessibility templates for dreamweaver, get info on accessibility seminars.
  • Colorzilla - "It assists web developers and graphic designers with color related tasks - both basic and advanced. With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program."
  • Fangs - The Firefox Screen Reader Emulator Extension
  • HTML Validator for Firefox and Mozilla (based on Tidy) - Marc Gueury. "HTML Validator is an Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation to Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page."
  • LinkChecker - Firefox Extension - Kevin Freitas. "Check webpage links at a glance with simple color coding. Ditch those massive listings of bad links that provide no context and add LinkChecker to your arsenal of web development tools today."
  • longdesc - adds view long description to the image context menu.
  • LowBrowse - "While existing programs enable blind people to access the web effectively, LowBrowse is the first program to enable people with moderate or severe low vision to both view web pages as the original web author intended and read the text on those pages tailored to their own visual needs. The highly anticipated program, which runs in conjunction with the Mozilla Firefox browser, will be offered at no charge and is expected to be available to the public for download via the Firefox add-on site in late summer or early fall of 2008."
  • Operator - Michael Kaply. "Operator lets you combine pieces of information on Web sites with applications in ways that are useful. For instance, Flickr + Google Maps, Upcoming.org + Google Calendar, Yahoo! Local + your address book, and many more possibilities and permutations. All of these scenarios are possible due to Microformats, an emerging standard for injecting semantics into HTML..."
  • pnhtoolbar - Features include: links to most W3C Specifications, automated submission to many validation tools, hide & show style sheets, apply your own external style sheet, highlight many HTML elements, resize Window to specific dimensions for testing, highlight form information, view page cookies.
  • Table Inspector - Gez Lemon's extension reveals accessibility attributes for complex tables.
  • Table Inspector By James Graham.
  • Total Validator Extension - Andy Halford. "Perform multiple validations and take screen shots in one go rather than using separate tools. This 5-in-1 validator uses the online Total Validator service. Provides true HTML validation using the official DTDs. So you no longer have to put up with mistakes in the W3C validator and tools such as Tidy which interpret the standards incorrectly. Also performs accessibility validation, checks for broken links, spell checking, and takes screen shots so you can validate your pages with different browsers."
  • View Formatted Source - Felix Ritter. "Displays formatted and color-coded source and optional CSS information for each element. You can see exactly which CSS rules match for an element. The rules are displayed including file name and line number. The topmost element is that with the highest priority. You can fold/unfold/hilite block elements (table, tr, td, div, span,...). Really cool feature: select a block level element of interest directly in the page and view it's source! To help you to quickly analyze the source code you can view images directly from the source and add comments to folded block elements. The code view is based on the rendered document, so you will also see dynamically (by Javascript) created and modified html elements! Works also with frames and selected text."
  • View Source Chart - Jennifer Madden. This Extension "Creates a colorful chart of a web pages rendered source code and displays source in its altered state after the DOM has been manipulated by JavaScript."
  • ViewSourceWith - Davide Ficanco. "This is a extension, compatible with most mozilla applications, that allows you to open source pages with your preferred editor, useful for programmer and web designer. Tested under Windows and Linux (from version 0.0.6 works on MacOSX)."
  • X-Ray - Stuart Robertson. "This Firefox extension lets you to see the markup of a page without viewing source, which can be useful when debugging. It's also both fun and educational to use X-Ray to explore the markup used on other people's sites."
• Firefox 1.5 Accessible Widgets - Gez Lemon. "Firefox 1.5 supports dynamic web content accessibility to help the advancement of Rich Internet Web Applications. To help illustrate how this, I've developed a simple keyboard accessible colour selection widget. The widget only works with Firefox 1.5 with scripting enabled, as the purpose is to demonstrate the accessibility features of Firefox 1.5."
  • Keyboard Accessible Colour Selection Widget - Gez Lemon
• Flickering and Photosensitive Epilepsy Online Tool - Renzo Giust; Translated by Roberto Castaldo. A tool for checking flicker rates in animated gifs.
• Functional Accessibility Evaluator - Center for Instructional Technology Accessibility. "The Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE), formerly called the Web Accessibility Management Tool (WAMT), analyzes web resources for markup that is consistent with the use of CITES/DRES HTML Best Practices for development of functionally accessible web resources that also support interoperability."
• formArchitect - Eric Smith. "Create complex html forms without using tables for layout..."
• GetContentSize - Adrian Holovaty
• InFocus from SSBTechnologies.
• Header Ordering Checker - University of Durham. "This header levels checker linearized each page and checks the order of headers. It will give a warning for each improperly ordered header. It is advisable to make sure that your page validates before using this utility, as improperly matched headers, or headers within headers could cause problems.
• LIFT Online from UsableNet
• Lynx Viewer - See how pages rendered with text-browser Lynx. It generates an HTML page that indicates how much of the content of a web page would be available to Lynx, which is a text-only browser. In addition to showing how useful a site would be for a visually-impaired person, it is also a good indicator for anyone with older technology.
• Lynx Viewer by Yellow Pipe - "The Lynx Viewer allows webmasters to see what their pages will look like when viewed with Lynx, a text-mode web browser. It is also presumably, how search engines see your site."
• Macaw - whitanderson.com. Macaw is a free Macintosh application that creates QuickTime text tracks.
• MAGpie - MAGpie is a free tool available for download from the National Center for Accessible Media. This software lets you add captions to RealVideo, QuickTime, and Windows Media files.
• Net-guide.co.uk - David Poehlman. This is a search engine that gives an accessibility rating for the websites returned for any query entered.
• NVDA (Non Visual Desktop Access) - a free and open source screen reader for Windows
• OATS (Open Source Assistive Technology Software) - "OATSoft is dedicated to improving Assistive Technology and computer accessibility through the power of Open Source development techniques. OATSoft makes the best Open Source Assistive Technology Software (OATS) easy to find. Users and developers meet at OATSoft to create better software."
• Online Accessibility Check - etre. "Check the compliance of your website with a number of leading accessibility guidelines using our automated online page check.".
• Open Document Format (ODF) Accessibility Evaluator - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "The ODF Accessibility Analyzer is a tool to be employed by users of Open Document Format compatible authoring tools to ensure that a document in this format, be it text, spreadsheet, presentation, etc., is accessible to people with disabilities. The Analyzer will adhere to the ODF specification, as put forth by the OASIS organization (http://www.oasis-open.org/). Where possible, the software will also adhere to upcoming accessibility features and standards in forthcoming ODF specifications, such as ODF 1.1. In addition, the Analyzer will check for accessibility issues common to most interactive technologies..."
• Opera - A free, fast, highly standards-compliant Web browser that allows you to toggle images, style sheets, scripting, and tables on and off with a single mouse click. These features allow designers to check alt-text, see how tables linearize, and ensure that pages work with style sheets turned off.
  • Opera's Small-Screen Rendering - "With the release of Opera 7, Small-Screen Rendering is available for testing in a desktop browser for the first time. Just download the latest version of Opera 7 for Windows, open a Web page and hit Shift+F11."
• PDF to HTML Converter - Adobe. This is a tool converts a pdf file to a text file. This tool works with very mixed results.
• Photosensitive Epilepsy Analysis Tool (PEAT) - Trace. "The Trace Center's Photosensitive Epilepsy Analysis Tool was developed to provide a way for web developers to identify potentially seizure inducing material. Download the beta version free and try it out."
• Ruby Accessibility Analysis Kit (Raakt) - Peter Krantz. "The Ruby Accessibility Analysis Kit (Raakt) is a toolkit to find accessibility issues in HTML documents. Raakt can be used as part of a an automatic test procedure or as a standalone module for mass validation of an entire site."
• Readability analyser - readability.info. "Find out for yourself where your writing style places your prose compared to other Web pages and writing samples..."
• Readability Test - Gez Lemon. "Gunning Fog, Flesch Reading Ease, and Flesch-Kincaid are reading level algorithms that can be helpful in determining how readable your content is. Reading level algorithms only provide a rough guide, as they tend to reward short sentences made up of short words. Whilst they're rough guides, they can give a useful indication as to whether you've pitched your content at the right level for your intended audience."
• RoboBraille - RoboBraille Consortium. "RoboBraille automates the translation of text documents into Braille and speech. The service is available free of charge to all non-commercial users."
• Sharkware, JAWS Screen Reader Adaptation for Mozilla Firefox - "Sharkware Development is an S2S project administered by Dr. Vicki Almstrum in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Texas at Austin. The goal of the Sharkware Development team is to create compatibility between Freedom Scientific's JAWS Screen Reader and the Mozilla Firefox next generation browser. Freedom Scientific has not created scripts that would allow JAWS to function properly in Mozilla Firefox or any other browser other than Internet Explorer. The purpose of our project is to create a bridge between these two software components so that everyone can have a choice of what browser they wish to use."
• SpokenText - Mark McKay Bruce Tsuji, and Robert Biddle. "This site allows you to upload text (.txt), Acrobat (.pdf) or Word (.doc) files and have them converted to spoken audio. We also let you record emails, text from a website or enter the text you need converted directly."
• STEP508 - section508.gov. "STEP508, the Simple Tool for Error Prioritization for Section 508 compliance, is an electronic tool that: Prioritizes the repairs you should make to ensure that your Web site is compliant with the accessibility requirements of Section 508."
• Surf Right Toolbar - Royal National Institute of Blind People and Web Accessibility Tools Consortium. "We're very excited to release a beta version of our Surf Right Toolbar. The Surf Right Toolbar is designed to make adjusting certain options within Internet Explorer quicker and easier, using either the mouse or keyboard. Developed by RNIB and the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium (WAT-C) the Accessibility Toolbar is a free download and currently in beta version. We'd love to hear what you think of it and any ideas for additions that you'd like to see by emailing us at webaccess@rnib.org.uk."
• Tablin: an HTML Table linearizer - from w3.org. HTML Tables, whether used for layout or for real data, can create problems for people reading the Web line-by-line (e.g. columned text read across the page out of order: reading sentences on the same row from different columns as one sentence).
• TENbot Tool - David Burke. "Convert online newsfeeds in Really Simple Syndication (RSS) format to the Text Email Newsletter (TEN) standard developed by E-Access Bulletin publishers Headstar. The TEN Standard allows easy navigation for screen reader and print impaired users. TENbot, aimed primarily at web site owners, has been designed by David Burke of UK technology firm Daden..."
• Helen Toolbar Application Download - American Foundation the Blind
• Thunder - screenreader.net. "At ScreenReader.net we have freeware for blindness and visual impairment special needs throughout the world. It is free only to individual blind people for their personal use at home: it is not free to organisations...Download the Thunder ScreenReader talking software and your modern XP or Vista computer will be immediately usable by someone who can't see to read the screen."
• Truwex: Website Validation Tool - Vladimir Popov. "An online tool to check web accessibility, privacy, quality, performance. It checks a single page and shows results on a web page screenshot and in the HTML code."
• UMD Web Templates
• Viewable with any Browser
• Image Analyser - Gez Lemon: "This service examines all images found on a web page to check for any accessibility issues. The width, height, alt, and longdesc attributes are examined for appropriate values..."
• WAVE - helps people perform design tasks that require human judgment (e.g. "Does this ALT text provide a functional equivalent for this image?" "Does this reading order make sense?"). The Wave displays the ALT text of images and areas on the page for comparison with the images, provides numbered arrows to show the linearized reading order, and shows the HTML equivalent (if any) provided for applets. WAVE features that help users compare visual and textual representations are not directly useful to people who are blind; but the output is accessible so people who are blind can check the output for completeness.
  • Introducing WAVE 4.0 - Jared Smith
• WaiZilla - Tim Roberts. WaiZilla will be an open source accessibility checking tool. It will integrate with Mozilla browsers (like Netscape 7) and provide instant checks on local and online web pages; it will also work on Windows, Mac and Linux. It will check against WCAG 1.0 and in future Section 508 and WCAG 2 when it arrives.
• WAEX: Web Accessibility Evaluator in a single XSLT file - Vicente Luque Centeno. "It evaluates many WCAG conditions and also some XHTML restrictions not yet formalized in the XHTML DTD (but in the prose of the specification)."
• Web Accessibility Checker (for WCAG 2.0) - Adaptive Technology Resource Center (ATRC) at the University Of Toronto. "This is an experimental service provided by the Adaptive Technology Resource Center (ATRC) at the University Of Toronto. It is a model system that demonstrates how web pages can be checked for accessibility problems."
• Web Accessibility Inspector - Fujitsu. "Web Accessibility Inspector can (help) check the accessibility of a website automatically and efficiently on W3C WCAG 1.0 and Fujitsu Web Accessibility Guidelines."
• Web Accessibility Toolbar - Steven Faulkner. "The Accessibility Toolbar is provided by the Accessible Information Solutions (AIS) team at the National Information and Library Service (NILS), Australia...It is not designed to tell the user if a page/site is accessible, it is designed to help the user to interrogate aspects (structure/code/content) of an html document that can have an affect on the accessibility of that document...System Requirements: Microsoft Windows,Internet Explorer 5.0 or later with Javascript enabled." Web Accessibility Toolbar [For IE], Version 2.0 Beta from the Paciello Group.
• Web Accessibility - Toolbar (For Opera) - Web Accessibility Tools Consortium. "WAT for Opera a version of the popular testing tool, the Web Accessibility Toolbar, that can be installed on the Opera web browser."
• Web Accessibility Tools Consortium - "The Web Accessibility Tools Consortium [WAT-C] provides a collection of free tools to assist both developers and designers in the development and testing of accessible web content. The consortium is a collaboration of some of the world's leading accessibility practitioners, founded by Accessible Information Solutions (Australia), Infoaxia (Japan), The Paciello Group (USA), Wrong HTML (Japan), and Juicy Studio (UK). Our goals are to develop new tools, improve current tools and expand the range of browsers, operating systems and languages in which our tools are available."
• WebAnywhere - WebInSight. "A web-based screen reader to provide blind web users equal access to the web from any computer without requiring the installation of special, expensive software."
• WebbIE - Alasdair King. "WebbIE is a web browser for blind and visually-impaired people, especially those using screen readers. The Accessible programs let you access news and audio on the Internet in a simple and accessible way, allowing you to use podcasts, listen to the radio and read RSS and news with your screen reader or other access solution. Together they provide a way to access websites and other great things online"
• Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer - delorie.com
• WebXACT - WatchFire, "WebXACT is a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues."
• Yes/No List Creator - Ian Lloyd. "What is this? It's a tool for quickly generating accessible, XHTML-compliant yes/no radio button choices from a list, that's what. Another time-saver I put together 'cos I got fed up with hand coding all this nonsense. Try it out, hombre."

Color Tools

• 4096 color wheel - Jemima Pereira
• Accessibility Color Wheel - Giacomo Mazzocato. "This is a tool I realized for personal use which might help in the choice of a color pair, for instance to write a web page. For the sake of accessibility the text and background color of a site should be clear also to people who have not a perfect vision. The page with this tool helps to achieve that by analyzing the contrast of a color pair and showing how color-blind people see it. It simulates three kinds of vision deficiencies. One of them, tritanopia, is anyway very rare. If the contrast between the colors is good, a big OK! appears. It's also possible to analyze whether the colors are good in single cases."
• Accessibility Tools for Quality Assurance: Color Contrast - Martin Kliehm
• Color Blender - Eric A. Meyer and Steven Champeon
• Colorblind Web Page Filter - Type in your site's URL, select the filter you would like to use and click the Fetch and Filter button.
• Colour Blindness Simulator - Etre. "Use our Colour Blindness Simulator to reveal how your images may appear to users with a variety of colour blindness conditions. Upload a JPEG image of no more than 1000 pixels x 1000 pixels (100 KB filesize or less) to see how colour blind users may see it."
• ColorBrewer! "ColorBrewer is an online tool designed to help people select good color schemes for maps and other graphics. It is free to use, although we'd appreciate it if you could cite us if you decide to use one of our color schemes."
• Colour Contrast Analyser - Gez Lemon. This tool can help determine if foreground and background colour combinations provide sufficient color contrast.
  • Firefox Extensions Updated To Version 3 - Gez Lemon. "The Colour Contrast Analyser, Table Inspector, and Glossary of Terms Firefox extensions have all been updated to be compatible with Firefox version 3..."
• Contrast Analyser 2.0 - Paciello Group. "It is primarily a tool for checking foreground & background color combinations to determine if they provide good color visibility. It also contains functionality to create simulations of certain visual conditions such as color blindness..."
• Colour Contrast Analyser Firefox Extension (New and Improved) - Gez Lemon. "The Juicy Studio Colour Contrast Firefox Extension has been updated to match the latest version of the draft Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, and includes a patch that checks for contrast for input elements."
• Color Contrast Analyser: An Alternative Analyser - Mel Pedley. "Why 'alternative'? Because I believe that the standard analyzers that apply the W3C thresholds place too much emphasis on high contrasts. Why is high contrast a problem? It can make pages difficult to read for many people with dyslexia. So, what's different about this Analyser? As well as using the W3C thresholds, it uses the Hewlett Packard Color Difference threshold which, at 400, is 20% lower than the corresponding W3C figure. It also provides a 'high contrast' warning if the colour difference exceeds 600."
• Colour Contrast Analyser for MAC - Cedric Trevisan of the Paciello Group (Europe) and the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium. "A MAC version of the Contrast Analyser has been developed by Cedric Trevisan (TPG). The interface is similar to the windows version...at this stage the CCA MAC does not have the image simulation features found in the windows version."
• Colour Contrast Visualiser - stainlessvision. "This tool allows you to visualise good colour combinations on a Photoshop style colour picker. It's primary use is finding acceptable colours from an existing inaccessible combination - while maintaining the aesthetic appeal of the original."
• Color Chart Pickers - Marie. To use, just click on the button color you wish to view. The background color of this page will change to that color.
• Colour Check - etre. "Our online Colour Check determines the colour difference and contrast between any two colours to maximize readability."
• Colour Contrast Analyser By Vision Australia. "It is a tool for checking foreground and background colour combinations to determine if they provide good colour visibility. Determining 'colour visibility' is based on algorithms suggested by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)"
• Colour Contrast Check Tool - Jonathan Snook. "The Colour Contrast Check Tool allows to specify a foreground and a background colour and determine if they provide enough of a contrast 'when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen'".
• Colours and Contrast - Tommy Olsson. "This tool computes the colour brightness difference and the colour difference between a background colour and a foreground colour."
• Color Contrast Comparison - Joe Dolson
• Color Contrast Verification Tool - Hewlett-Packard
• Color Contrast Test - Joe Dolson
• Color Conversion Calculator - Autopedia.com
• Color Designer - Kasper J. Jeppesen."A quick and easy to use tool to design color sets...released as a free (as in free beer) application for MacOS X."
• Color Doctor - Fujitsu. "Color Doctor is a tool that checks accessibility from the aspect of color. It converts any images displayed on screen such as browsers or Microsoft PowerPoint presentations into gray scale or colors that persons with color vision deficiency can see...for Windows XP only."
• Color Harmonizer - EasyRGB
• ColorMatch 5K
• Colour Matcher - Jemima Pereira
• Color Metric Converter
• Color Palette Creator v1.6 - Steve Chipman. "This tool...will create 10 shades of the base color, located top-left, at varying degrees of opacity. The top row emulates opacity over a white background, the bottom over black (or colors of your choosing as of v1.4). The opacity values are 100% opaque, 75%, 50%, 25% and 10% on the top row. The bottom row begins at 85% rather than 100% and continues on as the first."
• Color Picker - Andrew Porter Glendinning.
• Color Scheme Picker - Petr Stanicek.This tool lets you chose base colors and complements, split complements, double contrast, monochromatic, and analogic. After that you can refine the scheme by clicking on the hex color to the right. Additionally it allows you to select regular vision as well as the various types of color blindness.
• Color Schemer by Colorschemer.com
• Color Scheme Generator 2 - Petr Stanic ek (pixy). "Generator of color schemes and palettes to create good-looking and well balanced and harmonic web pages. This is the new version of the previous color generator."
• Color Selector - Fujitsu. "Color Selector can check the background-color and character-color combination by people with cataracts or color blindness."
• Color Visibility Test Program - APrompt
• Color Wizard - webwhirlers. "The Colour Wizard lets you type in the value of your colour and get an automatic return of that colour's complementary colour, split complementary colours, analogous colours, chromatic variations, shade and tint variation and saturation variation."
• Colorzilla - "ColorZilla is an extension for Mozilla Firefox and the Mozilla Suite. It assists web developers and graphic designers with color related tasks - both basic and advanced. With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program."
• colr.org - Lloyd Dalton. "A site for playing with colors."
• ColorSelector - Fujitsu.com. "ColorSelector is a powerful tool for developers to help determine the most accessible combinations of background colors and text colors in real time."
• Combo Tester - Gremillion Consulting . A tool "that allows web developers to see how different color combinations work together on the screen."
• CSS Color Chart - Shailesh N. Humbad
• Daily Color Scheme - Walter Tamboer. "Daily Color Scheme.com is all about color. Every day color. We serve a new colorscheme every day of the year, to keep the designers head fueled with inspirational and usable color schemes."
• GrayBit - Jona Fenocchi and Mike Cherim. "GrayBit is an online accessibility testing tool designed to visually convert any full-color web page into a grayscale rendition for the purpose of visually testing the page's perceived contrast."
• HexColorPicker - LuckySoftware. HexColorPicker is a html plugin for Mac OS X's builtin colorpicker.
• Hex Color Picker by Jesper - "Lets you get and edit hexadecimal HTML color codes in the standard Mac OS X color panel."
• Hex Color Picker by wafflesoftware. "Lets you get and edit hexadecimal HTML color codes in the standard Mac OS X color panel."
• Infohound Color Schemer - Jonathan Hedley
• moreCrayons - Kirk Franklin
• Like Your Colors - Owen Winkler. "Use this tool to extract the colors from the HTML and CSS of any web site. Compare the colors easily using hue groups."
• Luminosity Contrast Ratio Algorithm - Gez Lemon. "Guideline 1.4 of the draft version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 requires that it is easy to distinguish foreground information from background images or sounds. The guideline suggests a luminosity contrast ratio algorithm to help determine the contrast between foreground and background colours. To help understand the algorithm, I have provided a Luminosity Contrast Ratio Analyser (Beta), along with example luminosity contrast ratios."
• Name that Color - Chirag Mehta. "Click and drag over the Color Wheel to make a color..."
• Palette Grabber Firefox Extension - Konstantine Prevas. "Creates a color palette for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or Flash based on the current page."
• Palettizer - Markup.co.nz.
• Sim Daltonism - Michel Fortin. "Sim Daltonism is a color blindness simulator for Mac OS X. It filters in real-time the area around the mouse pointer and display the result in a floating palette."
• Test Your Color IQ - Drag and drop the colors in each row to arrange them by hue order.
• The Color Palette Creator - S.G. Chipman
• Vischeck - Vischeck is a way of showing you what things look like to someone who is color blind. You can use it on a single image or on a web page. You can also download programs to let you run it on your own computer.

Cascading Style Sheet Tools

• Analysing IDs - Christian Heilmann. This is an online tool that analyzes a web page for IDs. It will list all of them on a page and tell alert you to any that are used more than once
• Back To Font Web Color Picker - Nifty little CSS tool lets you pick a variety of CSS properties for the page you're viewing, on the fly, and copy and paste the results to your own pages. Written for IE 5.
• BBEdit CSS Syntax Checker - John Gruber. "If you work on CSS using either of Bare Bones Software’s text editors, you might be interested in my latest project: CSS syntax checking scripts for BBEdit and TextWrangler. They’re a combination of Perl and AppleScript that allows you to syntax-check CSS files using the W3C’s CSS Validation Service. Errors and warnings from the validation service are displayed in a results browser, very similar in effect to BBEdit’s built-in HTML syntax checker."
• Cascade DTP - Price Media. This is a free windows CSS web page editing tool that uses absolute positioning.
• Class Scanner Tool Set a.k.a. Drew made me do it - Chris Heilmann. "For an upcoming Microformats related project, Drew McLellan asked me to come up with a small script that includes all the tasks you need to deal with classes."
• Clean CSS - Jeff Finley. "CleanCSS is a powerful CSS optimizer and formatter. Basically, it takes your CSS code and makes it cleaner and more concise."
• Colly's CSS Rollover Generator - Simon Collison. "With this CSS rollover generator, you can create two distinct styles of rollover button, using CSS and just one image."
• CSS 3 Quick Reference Panel - Rijk van Geijtenbeek - Rijk van Geijtenbeek has announced a CSS3 Quick reference in the form of a browser sidebar.
• CSS Accessibility Analyser - Gez Lemon.
• CSSCheck - Web Design Group validation service for checking the syntax of your style sheets.
• CSS Creator - Douglas Livingstone. This is a is a" CSS generator, which you can use to create styles and test them on your site. If you are learning CSS have a look and see how changes will affect your site and generate the styles".
• CSS Editors - css-discuss Wiki. Huge listing of CSS editors.
• CSS Editor Bookmarklet for IE - Steve Faulkner. "For times when CSS styles need to be tested, on the fly, in Internet Explorer, the CSS editor bookmarklet can come in handy. It was originally developed from the test styles bookmarklet by Jesse Ruderman. When Internet Explorer 7 came along it ceased to work, but after much fiddling around I was able to get it working in IE 7. The CSS editor has the same functionality as the 'test styles' function on the Web Accessibility Toolbar."
• cssdocs.org - Pete Freitag. "I have just launched another documentation shortcut site, this time for CSS: cssdocs.org. It allows you to get to CSS documentation from the url, for instance type in: cssdocs.org/text-decoration to go to the W3C documentation for the text-decoration property."
• CSS Love Child - Cameron Adams. "...My little bit of Perl scripting lets you take the HTML from one page, add the styles of another, and end up with a hideously mutated beast that can sometimes be amusing, sometimes be revealing, but most of the time looks like a fourth generation hillbilly..."
• CSS Optimiser - cssoptimiser.com. "Online CSS Optimizer is a web tool for reducing the file size of cascading style sheets. In order to save more space optimized files would be messy even so you may output it as a file. Non-valid or hacked (for certain browsers) CSS files may result in error."
• CSS Redundancy Checker - Google. A tool for checking your markup for outdated CSS rules that don't match any of your HTML.
• CSS Rounded Box Generator (Beta) - neuroticweb.
• CSS Specificity Calculator - Stephen Ball. "Paste your CSS into the field below, the specificity of your selectors will be calculated for you..."
• CSS Sprite Generator - Ed Eliot and Stuart Colville. An automated Generator for CSS Sprites. Upload a zip of graphics and it will spit out a single image and a block of CSS.
• CSSTidy - Florian Schmitz. "CSSTidy is an open source CSS parser and optimizer. It is available as executable file (available for Windows, Linux and OSX) which can be controlled per command line and as PHP script (both with almost the same functionality)."
  • CSS Formatter and Optimiser - Online version of CSSTidy
• CSS Type Set - By csstypeset.com. "CSS Type Set is a hands-on typography tool allowing designers and developers to interactively test and learn how to style their web content...The site serves as a hands-on tool for beginning designers and developers to interactively experiment with CSS in a WYSIWYG fashion. While similar concepts have been done before, our main focus was delivering a unique, easy-to-understand interface with instant CSS preview and output. When using the style controls, users are able to visually see how their entered text is affected and what code is used to achieve this specific look."
• Dust-Me Selectors - Sitepoint. "Dust-Me Selectors is a Firefox extension (for v1.5 or later) that finds unused CSS selectors..."
• Firdamatic: the Design Tool for the Uninspired Webloggers - "Firdamatic is an online tableless layout generator that allows you to create and customise layouts easily only by completing forms, making creating skins for your Firdamatic-based layout a breeze."
• How z-index Works - Thierry Koblentz. "This page is to demonstrate how elements stack."
• Learning To Let Go (Styleswitcher on steroids) - Chris Heilmann. This tool "...is a PHP based solution that enables you as the designer to offer various Style Sheets, and enable the user to change colours, layout and font sizes. The data entered will be stored in a cookie and you do NOT need any PHP knowledge."
• List-o-matic - Ian Lloyd. This online wizard generates and formats navigation menus via CSS and semantically correct XHTML. It creates inline unordered lists with title attributes and then allows you to choose have vertical or horizontal CSS styles to them. A great time saver.
• List-o-Rama Dreamweaver Extension - George Petrov
• List-u-Like CSS Generator - James Edwards. "Most web-developers agree that using lists for navigation is a good idea, and styling a simple navbar is pretty easy. Yet as designs get more sophisticated, and browser-quirks multiply like coat hangers, the CSS involved can soon get rather complicated. But what if you had a tool that gave you detailed control over the appearance of a navigation list, and took account of browser variations itself - so that all you had to do was design it, and the exact CSS would be written for you..? Well now you do - the List-u-Like CSS Generator".
• Jello Generator - Mike Purvis. "This tool allows you to specify exactly how you would like your customized Jello Mold to behave. You specify a maximum and minimum width for your site, and then you can also specify the exact browser width at which the maximum width is first reached."
• MRI - John Allsopp. "MRI is a free cross browser tool that lets you test selectors with any web page. Selectors, particularly complex ones can be difficult to get exactly right - MRI lets you experiment with them on any web page (local or online, static or dynamic)."
• Playing with CSS Selectors - Mauricio Samy Silva. Enter advanced compound CSS selectors into a field. Results are displayed live on the same page.
• rendr 2 - greg taff. "I've been tinkering with a rapid html prototyping tool for sometime and have finally fixed a critical bug that was making it a pain to use for large bits of markup. I now feel its good enough to share."
• Selector Builder Preview Version - Daniel Glazman. "I am releasing a v0.1 standalone version of the CSS3 Selector builder through Disruptive Innovations. It's available here and it allows you to write a CSS3 selector in a human-friendly way. Warnings: 1.) Tristan Nitot reported problems using Deer Park; please use Firefox 1.0.6. 2.) The code is not free, and you're not allowed to copy the code elsewhere w/o prior written authorization. 3.) Yes, I know, some CSS3 simple selectors are missing. 4.) There's no sanity control on the textboxes. Enjoy."
• Selectoracle - Find out what a particularly complex CSS selector really means. This tool translates cascading style sheets 2 and 3 selectors.
• Simple CSS - HostM.com
• Sky CSS Tool - "Online CSS authoring tool allows you to create CSS classes almost without using manuscript code. JavaScript compatible browser is needed for the proper functioning."
• Spanky Corners - Alex Walker. "'Spanky Corners' is an experimental technique for using only CSS to produced 'round-cornered content boxes' with semantically pure markup. It does not require JavaScript to work."
• Style Sheet Optimizer - flumpcakes
• User Agent Switcher Extension - Chris Pederick. "The User Agent Switcher extension for Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser."
• W3C CSS Validation Service - Philippe Le Hegaret, Sijtsche de Jon
  • W3C CSS Validator FAQ.
• Webucator - A CSS reference that allows you to test your CSS code.
• XRAY - John Allsopp. "XRAY is a bookmarklet for Safari, Firefox, Camino or Mozilla. Use it to see the box model for any element."
• Xylescope - Jurgen Schweizer. "Xylescope has been designed and developed for looking underneath the surface of web pages as you surf the web - it couldn't be easier. Using Xylescope you can look forward to analyzing complex CSS designs with incredible ease and experimenting with third-party sites, without having to download them onto your own computer first...System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later."

HTML Validators, Lints & Viewers

• AnyBrowser.com - HTML and link lint, search engine tools, and other browser compatibility tests. Also tools relevant for accessibility include viewing in various screen sizes, view with images are replaced by ALT text.
• Browser Emulator - dejavu.org.
• Checky - The Checky is a Mozilla/firefox and Netscape plug-in. It is a simple Interface for web designers and developers to free and commercial online Validator and Checker services. You can run your page against the W3C's markup and CSS validators, and the Web Design Group's HTML Validator, single keystroke. Now there is no excuse not to validate.
• CSE HTML Validator Lite - "Clean up your site with CSE Lite! CSE HTML Validator Lite is an award winning free HTML editor and basic HTML syntax checker for Microsoft Windows." - htmlvalidator.com.
• Dreamweaver Code Cleaner - Webmaster Toolkit . "Our Dreamweaver Code Cleaner will read the page you specify, and clean a lot of the un-needed code created by Macromedia Dreamweaver. This helps to shrink the size of the actual page, which has many benefits..."
• Evolt Browser Archive.
• Feng GUI - "Find out how people View your website or image and which areas are getting most of the attention. The ViewFinder Heatmap service, is an artificial intelligence service which simulates human visual attention and creates an attention heatmap."
• HTML 5, a New Step By Karl Dubost. "We are happy to announce that W3C has integrated a version of HTML 5 conformance checker into a beta instance of the W3C Markup validator."
• HTML Validator for Firefox and Mozilla (based on Tidy) - Marc Gueury. "HTML Validator is an Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation to Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page."
• icapture - Daniel Vine. "iCapture is provided as a public service to the 97% of the computing world without macs. Standing tall, we 3% hereby declare 'we too have a browser'. So go on, give it a try by entering your URL above. You'll be delivered a screenshot of your site as a Mac sees it through Safari or Internet Explorer, all in 30 seconds or so. (Assuming the queue is empty) Come back as often as you would like."
• IE Tab - mozdev.org. "IE Tab is a Firefox extension that allows you to switch to a new tab to see how a website looks in Internet Explorer. If you like to develop websites with Firefox then this useful add-on allows you to quickly view how your site is looking in Internet Explorer as you develop."
• iPhone Test Simulator
• jslint, The JavaScript Verifier - Douglas Crockford. "jslint takes a JavaScript source and scans it. If it finds a problem, it returns a message describing the problem and an approximate location within the source. The problem is not necessarily an error, although it often is. jslint looks at some style conventions as well as structural problems. It does not prove that your program is correct. It just provides another set of eyes to help spot problems."
• LogValidator - "Log Validator is a web server log analysis tool with focus on the quality of Web documents. Thanks to a modular, extensible design, the Log Validator can help Web authors find the most popular content on their web site that matches a particular criteria...This tool is here to make your life as a webmaster, web designer, web developer even easier, by telling you which documents you should fix in priority."
• Lynx Viewer - See how pages rendered with text-browser Lynx. It generates an HTML page that indicates how much of the content of a web page would be available to Lynx, which is a text-only browser. In addition to showing how useful a site would be for a visually-impaired person, it is also a good indicator for anyone with older technology.
• Page Valet - a validator, originally for HTML but now expanded to support other SGML and XML document types.
• rel-lint - Drew McLellan. "This is a lint tool (like a non-authoritative validator) for XFN, rel-tag and other microformats that make use of the rel attribute of links. It takes the form of a bookmarklet you can add to your browser and then run against any page. rel-lint will check for known XFN values, flag values it doesn't recognize (even though they may well be correct) and display the tag values for rel-tagged links."
• Real HTML Validation - This part of Liam Quinn's site details the difference between validators and lints. It has links to each major validator and lint.
• SafariTest - snugtech.com. "How does your website look on Apple Safari? Enter your URL in the box above and click View. SafariTest will return a screenshot of your page as viewed with Safari."
• Screen Size Tester
• Table Integrity Checker - Henri Sivonen."I am working on a conformance checking service for (X)HTML5. The service is grammar-based for the most part with RELAX NG as the schema language. Some extra-grammatical constraints are expressed as Schematron assertions. Currently, as a Mozilla Foundation grantee, I am working on writing checkers (in Java) for spec features that cannot (practically or at all) be checked using RELAX NG or Schematron."
• Tablin: an HTML Table linearizer - from w3.org. HTML Tables, whether used for layout or for real data, can create problems for people reading the Web line-by-line (e.g. columned text read across the page out of order: reading sentences on the same row from different columns as one sentence).
• TIDY - Tidy is a free lint utility to check and clean up badly formed HTML. It is useful as a first-pass for helping to fix bad HTML. It also offers a means to convert existing HTML content into well-formed XML, for delivery as XHTML. A great tool! But please note: Tidy is not a validator. It is not a substitute for the W3C HTML Validator which verifies that your code meets the W3C standards. Tidy is highly recommended for any time you have to fix a truly awful mess or if you are a beginner, and find validator reports confusing or incomprehensible.
  • HTML Tidy Online by Jonathan Hedley - Online version of Dave Raggett's HTML Tidy.
  • HTML Validator (with Tidy) - Marc Gueury. This is a tidy extension for Firefox that "adds HTML validation to the View Page Source of the browser. The validation is done by Tidy from W3c". It works on Windows with Mozilla 1.7.x, 1.8.x and Firefox 0.9.x, 1.0PR.
  • HTML Tidy (Online) - Flumpcakes. "HTML Tidy Online is a web front end to the command line program Tidy. It helps remove redundant and sloppy code. It has various options to improve code and fix errors in HTML documents."
  • Safari Tidy plugin - Kasper Nauwelaerts. "The Safari Tidy plugin is a small plugin that lets you validate the webpages you browse for (x)html compliance. The actual validation is done by Tidy. This plugin was modeled after a similar plugin for Firefox..."
  • Tidybot - Leo Breebaart. "Tidybot is a cross-platform batch XHTML syntax-checker and report-generator. It traverses a directory tree of XHTML files on your hard disk, and generates a web page listing all the errors and warnings it encounters. Tidybot can be used in two ways: from the command-line, or through a user-friendly GUI application. The output will be identical in either case."
  • Tidy Service - Scott Ahten. "Tidy Service is a simple OS X Service that cleans up markup using the popular HTML Tidy library originally created by Dave Raggett.".
  • Tidy your HTML by Dan Connolly - Online version of Tidy.
• Total Validator (online) Andy Halford. Free online tool. "Perform multiple validations and take screen shots in one go rather than using separate tools. Provides true HTML validation using the official DTDs. So you no longer have to put up with mistakes in the W3C validator and tools such as Tidy which interpret the standards incorrectly. Also performs accessibility validation, checks for broken links, spell checking, and takes screen shots so you can validate your pages with different browsers."
• Validator S.A.C. (Stand Alone Complex) - Habilis, A stand-alone, easy to install, version of the W3C's HTML / XHTML Markup Validator for Mac OS X.
• Validators - Daniel Tobias' explanation of what a validator and a linter are, what the difference between the two is, and how they can be used to help you improve your Web development. He also has links to major validators and lints.
• Viewable with any Browser
• W3C HTML Validator - Hugo Haas. Checks HTML documents for conformance to W3C HTML and XHTML recommendations and other HTML standards.
• WDG HTML Validator - From the Web Design Group. It uses the same engine as the W3C HTML Validator (David Clark's nsgmls) but produces easier to understand error messages. It also supports a wider variety of character encodings than the W3C validator.
• Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer - delorie.com
• Web Page Purifier - Removes non-standard HTML features from a page and shows what the result looks like.
• Web Site Test Tools and Site Management Tools
• Web Site Viewer - AnyBrowser.com
• (X)HTML5 Conformance Checking Service Technology Preview - Henri Sivonen "...The validation service checks whether a given document meets the constraints of the chosen schema(s). Both XML syntax and compact syntax RELAX NG schemas are supported. There is 'experimental' support for standalone (not embedded) Schematron 1.5 schemas. There are also non-schema checkers that can be used like schemas..."

Information Architecture Tools

• CardZort - Jorge A. Toro. "CardZort is a computer application that runs card sorting exercises. Its main purpose is to offer a complete computer-aided system that allows the fast creation and execution of card sorting exercises, and the analysis of the resulting groups via cluster analysis." It is free for academic purposes but runs only on the Windows platform.
• I.A. Tools - aifia.org.
• OmniGraffle - omnigroup.com. Bundled with the latest Macs, OmniGraffle is a diagramming and charting tool that is simple, elegant, and easy to use. A good tool for information architecture chores.
  • IA Stencils for Omnigraffle - paperplane.net. "These stencils are free for download and use have been created for use with OmniGraffle. They're optimized for version 3.0 and up, but will also work with version 2.0 onwards - just replace the '.gstencil' in the filename with '.graffle'".
  • Omnigraffle Stencils - Userfocus "Designed for use with Omnigroup visual communication software for Mac OS/X, these two Omnigraffle stencils were created to help communicate user-centered design activities and proposals to clients and development teams."
  OptimalSort - "OptimalSort is card sorting done online."
• swipr "...a toolset that allows information architects to create an integrated and interactive deliverable from standard Visio files."
• tree.pl sitemap script - "tree.pl walks through a directory and builds a HTML list of all files. The files' title tags are taken as the linked text, and if there is no title tag, the filename is used."
• Visio IA Stencil - Garrett Dimon
• Visio Stencils for Information Architects - Nick Finck
• The Pencil Project - Duong Thanh. Firefox 3 wireframing tool extension.
• WebCAT - National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
• Widgetopia - Christina Wodtke. "Want to learn how to do web design that makes sense architectually? Christina Wodtke has created a great resource called Widgetopia that does just that. Check out a stock pile of UI widgets for good design. It's like the Design Not Found for IA."

Link Checkers

• Back Links Analyzer - Aaron Wall. "A free link popularity / link analysis tool. It shows what anchor text is linking into a page or site...System Requirements: Backlink Analyzer currently is a Windows only application. Going forward I am hoping to make it system independent."
• Link Checker - Webmaster Toolkit. "Our Link Checker will read the page you specify, extract the links from it and test the status of each one. If any errors are found (broken links) these are reported."
• Link Checking Service - ITSS has purchased software that automates the checking of web pages for dead and broken links; missing page elements etc. This is a billable service.
• LinkLint - James B. Bowlin. "Linklint is an Open Source Perl program that checks links on web sites."
• LinkScan/QuickCheck - elsop. LinkScan is a link checking tool
• Link Valet - an online link checker that will recursively spider a site and report broken, redirected or updated links.
• Link Validation Spider - Dead-links. "Put your website or weblog home page URL in the input box and a little spider will read the html code and check for the broken links. The spider splits links in two categories, internal, from the same host, and external, outgoing link to different domains. Once you have put your start URL the bot will visit your website and follow all links checking for their status. When finish you will see a report showing all the bad links found, not only 404 status."
• UMD Bad URL List - Scott Hollatz's program that displays a list of pages with broken links on the University of Minnesota Duluth's web site. The list is generated by the University of Minnesota Duluth's search engine indexer. Since the indexer is told to ignore CGI, PDF, GIF, ~ pages, and a few others, and it only follows 7 URLs deep, the list represents a good idea what'll break if someone followed a link on the page. The output Scott chose was to give the base URL as a hyperlink, followed by the list of bad links on the page. The report is generated nightly.
• W3C Link Checker (Online version)
• W3C Link Checker (Standalone version)
• Xenu Link Sleuth - Link Sleuth is a free windows based link checker.

Miscellaneous Tools

• 28k and 56k Modem Emulator By Dave Child. "Regardless of your connection speed, this will show you how your site loads on PCs with older connections."
• activeCollab - "activeCollab is an easy to use, web based, open source collaboration and project management tool. Set up an environment where you, your team and your clients can collaborate on active projects using a set of simple, functional tools." It is a web app like Basecamp, but instead of being a hosted service, you download and install on your own web server."
• AJAX Regular Expression Evaluator - An AJAX regular expression evaluator that helps create PCRE, Posix and Javascript regular expressions.
• Aptana - Paul Colton. "Aptana is a robust, JavaScript-focused IDE for building dynamic web applications. Highlights include the following features: Code Assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, including your own JavaScript functions; Outliner that gives a snapshot view of your JavaScript, HTML; Error and warning notification for your code; Support for Aptana UI customization and extensions; Cross-platform support Free and open source licensed under the Eclipse Public License..."
• Background Image Maker - ab.rails2u.com
• Batch Website Link Popularity Checkers - Right Scripts. "Check how many pages indexed and how many back links to your site on search engine of Google, Yahoo, Msn, alltheweb,altavista and sympatico. You can input lists of domain names and download check report free."
• Beautify PHP - "This program tries to reformat and beautify PHP source code files automatically. The program is Open Source and distributed under the terms of GNU GPL. It is written in PHP and has a web frontend."
• Browser Size - Ates Goral. "Browser size related resources for web designers" includes "a nifty online tool for setting your browser size while doing Web design".
• Browsershots - Provide a URI and it will take real screenshots in different browsers of that page.
• Content-Type Proxy - Ian Hickson. "A script to serve a remote resource with a different content type."
• Code Formatter - Ed Eliot. "Prepares code snippets for inclusion in a blog post. Code is formatted with line numbers, indentation is preserved and special characters are replaced with entities where necessary."
• Conference Schedule Creator - Dmitry Baranovskiy. Easy timetable generator using correct table markup and microformats.
• Create Diff Between HTML Pages - Dominique Hazael-Massieux
  "...Every once in a while, we provide new services to make the life of our collaborators easier, and offer them to the public at large as much as possible; our latest toy in this category is an htmldiff service, which out of two online HTML documents will create a new document highlighting the differences between the two documents..."
• Customer Focus Calculator - futurenowinc "...analysis tool that counts certain words on your site that are key indicators of whether your focus is on the customer or not. As you use it, keep in mind this is nothing more than a handy, but rough guide that will help you focus on something important. There are lots of variables and also remember there are no shortcuts to writing great copy." Also, Customer Focus Calculator: Test your Copy
• Demographics Prediction - Microsoft. "You can use adCenter technology to predict a customer's age, gender, and other demographic information according to his or her online behavior-that is, from search queries and webpage views. General Distribution is the breakdown by age of MSN Search users-based on a one-month MSN Search log-regardless of search query used. Predicted Distribution is the predicted breakdown by age of MSN Search users for a single search query, based on the adLabs predictive model."
• Designer Plaything - Matthew O'Donoghue. "A tool designers and clients to experiment with different typography and colour combinations on a web page as well as check for colour accessibility level."
• DOMTool - Stuart Colville. "Online tool that takes "HTML as an input and output the correct DOM methods for inserting that content into a document..."
  • DOMTool Related Blog Post
  • Basic DOMTool Tutorial
  • DOM Tool: Mr T Edition - Muffin Research Labs. Mr. T talks to you about your bad syntax. "...Let us hope it encourages developers to pay more attention. In order to trigger an error try using inline style or event handlers (or use <a style="color:red" onclick="foo();" href="#">link</a>). While Stu, must remain the default Mr T is available in the options. Any suggestions for more characters? Perhaps the hair of Christian Heilmann might make an appearance."
• DTD Mapper - Cameron Adams. "Using the DTD Mapper all you have to do is paste in the URL of the DTD that your pages are meant to be validating to (that URL in the weird DOCTYPE line at the top of your source code), and you'll get a nice, collapsible list of all valid elements, with their attributes, possible child elements and possible parent elements."
• Docvert - Matthew Cruickshank. "This web service takes multiple word processor files (typically .doc) and converts them to HTML or any XML." Recently support for S5 Slideshow was added, meaning "that you can make slides based on word processing documents. New slides will be created for each 'Heading 1' within the document."
• Dreamweaver Additional Tags Extension - Patrick H. Lauke. "As I frequently need access to a few (X)HTML elements not readily available in Dreamweaver's default toolbar/menu, I quickly threw together this simple extension."
• Em Calculator - Piotr 'Riddle' Petrus. Online tool calculates em size equivalent to px size.
• Favikon - favikon.com. Upload images, crop them, and create favicons.
• FireBug - Joe Hewitt. "Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page."
  • Firebug - Part 1: The What and Why - Estelle Weyl.
• FirePHP - Christoph Dorn. Firefox extension and PEAR package for debugging PHP apps.
• Font Tester - fonttester.com. "Font Tester is a free online font comparison tool. It allows you to easily preview and compare different fonts side by side with various CSS font styles applied to them..."
• GetWebKit / Swift (Run Safari on Windows) - "Welcome to GetWebKit, the home of the first and only WebKit based Windows web browser. Featuring the excellent rendering engine used in popular Macintosh web browsers Safari and Shiira, GetWebKit offers a free, powerful, and open-source internet experience."
• Greeking Machine - Duck Island.com. "Our Greeking Machine will produce up to 50 random paragraphs of actual Latin text in Lorem Ipsum style. Lorem Ipsum is the style preferred most by typesetters and designers who create print design and layout compositions. Lorem Ipsum and Greeking, or Greeked text can be produced as well as, several other pseudo languages including Hillbilly and Metropolitan. Greeking is the method whereby Lorem Ipsum style text is created to fill a composition. Greeking replaces actual structured sentences with false text which is considered less distracting."
• Favelet Suite - Steve. G. Chipman
• FireBug - Firefox Extension - Joe Hewitt. "FireBug is a tool that aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter."
• Google PageRank Report - top25web.com
• Google Rank Calculator - Cameron Adams
• hCard Creator - Tantek Celik. "This user interface, and the code behind it, is provided as an example for the benefit of microformat open standards developers, and to demonstrate the clear one to one correspondence between microformat fields and microformat code. The code generated by this interface may be used for semantic web pages, structured blogging, or any other application that requires markup that is simultaneously human presentable and machine readable."
• hCalendar Creator
• hReview Creator
• HTML Entity Character Lookup - leftlogic. "Using HTML entities is the right way to ensure all the characters on your page are validated. However, often finding the right entity code requires scanning through 250 rows of characters. This lookup allows you to quickly find the entity based on how it looks..."
• IETester "IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process."
• iPhoney - marketcircle "Looking for a way to see how your web creations will look on iPhone? Look no further. iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment-powered by Safari-that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It's the perfect 320 by 480-pixel canvas for your iPhone development. And it's free...Mac OS X 10.4.7 or later..."
  • Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone - Apple "The following guidelines will help you prepare web content and design a website or web-based application for iPhone. If you are a seasoned web developer, there are probably just a few refinements you can make to ensure that your site looks great and works best on iPhone. You'll need to read only those guidelines that are unique to iPhone. If you are fairly new to web development, you'll want to make sure that you understand web standards and established web design best practices before following any iPhone-specific guidelines..."
• Insta-Select - Ian Lloyd. "A web developer's time-saver - lets you paste in a list of words/phrases (separated by carriage returns) and converts to an XHTML-compliant <select> list."
• IYHY - Benjamin Adam Howell. "IYHY is an attempt to fix the mobile web today instead of one or five years from now. If you sign-up IYHY will keep a running, editable list of your 'mobile bookmarks'. If you don't sign-up, that's cool too, IYHY will just strip all the crap from a web page and give you the good stuff when you're on the go -- the content." Additional info on IYHY.
• Inline Javascript Console - Oliver Steele. A lightweight Javascript debugging tool with a clean and simple UI. If you just need to pop in an expression here and there before adding it to your project, it's a handy tool.
• JavaScript Crunchinator - Mike Hall. "This utility can be used to reduce the size of JavaScript source code in a file. It uses some simple parsing and regular expressions to remove comments and unnecessary white space in the script code. Depending on your style of coding, it can produce significant savings in terms of file size."
• Kotatsu - a simple html table generator - Alexander Kaiser. "It's been a long time since I've used Dreamweaver for web development. I only find myself missing it when I need to create a table, especially when I want to have all cells in a particular column have a class. (I'm well aware of <colgroup>, I just don't subscribe.) So I created a tool to help create a table and throw in column classes quickly. I gave it a name so I can put it out there and let others use it, too."
• Meazure - C Thing Software. Here is a free windows program that "measures, magnifies and captures the screen by providing a battery of features in a cohesive user interface".
• Media-Convert - "...Online file conversion no installation, no virus and spywares..."
• .mobi Mobile Emulator " - "...check how your site looks to a typical mobile phone user."
• Obtrusive JavaScript Checker - Robert Nyman New!
• Office 2000 HTML Filter 2.0 - Microsoft. "The Office HTML Filter is a tool you can use to remove Office-specific markup tags embedded in Office 2000 documents saved as HTML..."
• OpTool - Martin Larsen. This is a handy (and free) Windows tool which will let you press a key combo and have a menu popup which will offer to open the current page in other browsers.
• Page Saver - Pearl Crescent. "...a free extension for Mozilla Firefox that lets you save an image of a web page to a file in PNG format."
• Paparazzi! - Nate Weaver. "Paparazzi! is a small utility for Mac OS X that makes screenshots of webpages."
• Perian - "Perian is a free plugin that enables QuickTime to play almost every popular video format...Perian requires OS X 10.4.7."
• PHP Code Beautifier - tote-taste. "This tool is designed to beautify PHP code, applying most of the PEAR standard requirements to it. It can even process really scrambled scripts, e.g. all code in one line, and thus may help you to get scripts into a more readable form."
• PHPform - Create HTML Form in Seconds - appnitro. "Create a HTML form in seconds."
• Podzinger - This online tool takes podcast feeds, runs voice recognition over them to produce a full text version of each podcast, and then provides a full text search capability.
• Pretty Printer for PHP, Java, C++, C, Perl, JavaScript, CSS "This is a source code beautifier (source code formatter), similar to indent. Please make a backup before you replace your code. Paste your source here..."
• 'Quick' and dirty JSON Editor - "Click one of the sample buttons to load a JSON sample into the textarea, next..."
• Quick Highlighter - Veign. "...create a webpage from your source code."
• Quick Lookup - aonic.net. Quick Lookup is an online AJAX enabled tool programming tool. It gives you quick lookup of syntax for PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and CSS. The information page says "Please keep in mind that this service is not meant to replace full-sized references / manuals. This service exists for when you just need a quick syntax check, param list, or function/property name."
• Quick Thumbnail - "The fastest way to resize your pictures and images. Choose an image file, select some resize options, and hit Resize it. Your image will be uploaded to the server and resized, and then any or all of the resized images will be provided in a single convenient view. Not only can you get simultaneous generation of different sizes but you can enlarge your images too."
• ROR Sitemap Generator - rorweb.com. "This free tool will crawl your website and generate a ROR Sitemap with up to 1,000 URLs for ALL search engines, not just Google..."
• S5 project: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System - Eric A. Meyer
• Screenshot Settings - Bruce Phillips. "This application is a GUI method for changing the screenshot (screen capture) settings in Mac OS X v10.4 (Tiger). Note that you can also drag-n-drop a folder onto this application to change the default location."
• SEO Analysis Tool - seoworkers.com. "This SEO Analysis tool is to help you analyze and measure the ranking potential of your web pages. It doesn't only analyze the Meta Tags of your pages, rather it tries to use the same spider technology as the search engines spiders them self."
• ScreenGrab - Andy Mutton. Free Firefox extension. "Screengrab saves entire webpages as images."
• Screen Size Tester
• Search Engine Position Checker - Webmaster Toolkit. "The Search Engine Position Checker tool will automatically query the search engines you specify and check if your URL appears in the first 50 results for your chosen keywords. If the URL is present, it will output what position it occupies. As an additional feature, the tool also informs you if any other URLs from your domain appear in the search results. The tool queries the following engines: Altavista, Excite, Google, HotBot, MSN, WiseNut, All the Web, and Teoma.".
• Selenium - Jason Huggins, Paul Gross and Jie Tina Wang. "Selenium is a test tool for web applications. Selenium tests run directly in a browsers, just as real users do. And they run in Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox on Windows, Linux and Macintosh."
• Semantic data extractor - Dominique Hazael-Massieux. "This tool, geared by an XSLT stylesheet, tries to extract some information from a HTML semantic rich document. It only uses informations available through a good usage of the semantics defined in HTML. The aim is to show that providing a semantically rich HTML gives much more value to your code: using a semantically rich HTML code allows a better use of CSS, makes your HTML intelligible to a wider range of user agents (especially search engines bots). As an aside, it can give clues to user agents developers on some hooks that could be interesting to add in their product."
• Semantic HTML Graphs - Joe Dolson. "The output of this Java applet has very limited accessibility. If you are using a screen reader or mobile device without Java support, you will not be able to make use of the information. If you are color blind, the value will be limited..."
• Shorty - Khoi Vinh. "Shorty is a simple tool for creating shorter, human- readable links from long URLs. You install Shorty on your server, so the links you create with it never go away."
• SiteReportCard - SiteReportCard.com. "SiteReportCard provides free website analysis and optimization reports."
• Sizer - brianapps. "Sizer is a freeware utility that allows you to resize any window to an exact, predefined size. This is extremely useful when designing web pages, as it allows you to see how the page will look when viewed at a smaller size. The utility is also handy when compiling screen-shots for documentation, using Sizer allows you to easily maintain the same window size across screen grabs."
• SpamCheck - SiteSell. "...Submit your planned newsletter/ad/etc. (via SpamCheck Form or via e-mail). In seconds, we'll return a Spam Score and recommendations on how to reduce the likelihood of your e-mail being filtered..."
• SnapShot - compete. "SnapShots are smart profiles of the websites we visit. Simply enter a domain (e.g. amazon.com) and SnapShot will provide traffic history, a trust assessment and a list of all available coupon codes."
• Tails (Firefox Extension) - Calvin Yu. "Tails is a Firefox extension that will display the presence of microformats on a webpage."
• Textile - Alex Shiels. "Textile takes plain text with *simple* markup and produces valid XHTML."
• The Eater of Meaning - Leonard Richardson's handy online tool will convert the text on a web page in