Worldspace & Visual Studio

Wow where has the time gone. It does not seem like that long ago I was doing the post for the Firefox add-on, and now it's March. So what has been keeping me busy you ask... well you didn't ask, but it gives me a good way to get on with the subject of this post!

Concentration on getting as far upstream as possible in the development and content creation process for one. We believe that by starting off with accessibility in mind if we can get tools into the hands of developers and content creators to test their own content that it will help in the overall process.

With that said we have rolled out several new IDE enhancements. These are for DreamWeaver, SharePoint Designer, and as the title in this stated Visual Studio. These enhancements / add-ins/ plug-ins etc allow developers working on content to test for accessibility without leaving their IDE.

When installed in Visual Studio a new menu option is created.

Figure 1) Visual Studio 2008 Worldspace Menu

After installation this menu allows users to select the compliance standard and level. This option is displayed above in Figure 1.

Figure 2) Server Configuration

The user is able to configure the Worldspace server, as well as the organization. This allows the analysis to be performed to meet your organizations standards, and not simply generic standards.

Figure 3) Worldspace Results

After the user has configured the analysis standard, and set the Worldspace server information. The user selects the run accessibility check. Worldspace then contacts the preview server on Visual Studio; retrieves the content, and performs the analysis. This configuration allows for the use of included content as a lot of web sites and applications are not simply one static page.

The results returned in figure 3 display the issues with the file analyzed.

In a future blog I will be covering some improvements made to the Firefox add-on that will allow for source code analysis.

-D