[Introduction, woman's voice over music] Welcome to Web Axe, practical web accessibility tips. Web Axe dot blogspot dot com. Web Axe. Web site accessibility. Web standards. Web Axe dot blogspot dot com.
Dennis Lembree: Hello, and welcome to Web Axe Podcast #82 Deque Labs FireEyes. Again, this is your host, Dennis, and I have Ross on the line.
Ross Johnson: Hello, Dennis. How's it going?
Dennis: Pretty well, thank you. How are you?
Ross: I'm doing well. As I mentioned I've been up since five today working, so been productive but we'll see how long that lasts.
Dennis: Yeah, you've been pretty busy. So you're flying out to San Francisco for the Voices That Matter Conference?
Ross: Yeah, yeah. So leaving Friday just to spend a couple days in the San Francisco area just because I've never been. Then the conference is Monday, Tuesday. They have some pretty good speakers: Steve Krug, Dan Cederholm. Yeah, so it should be interesting.
Dennis: Cool, cool. So you're not going to stay for Wednesday? I think there's some kind of CSS workshop or something. I don't know.
Ross: Yeah. There was one thing on Wednesday, but I don't think my tickets included that. I already had to miss one day of teaching to do this, and I think they'd frown...
Dennis: Ah. Yeah, yeah. OK. Well, hopefully I'll see you there. I did acquire a free ticket through Debra from Refresh Detroit. So I'm going to try to make it. That'd be cool.
Ross: Yes! Yeah, that'd be fun.
Dennis: Speaking of Refresh Detroit, we haven't given them a mention in a little while. They recently had a big Drupal Meetup that I guess turned out really well. And there's a nice write-up and review about the events on Refresh-Detroit.org.
Ross: Yeah, Drupal's getting more and more popular, it seems. I'm not a huge fan, I must confess, but it's very capable. Actually, Drupal 7, the new one that's supposed to be coming out sometime or another, does look pretty good.
Dennis: Yeah, I know a couple guys that are big in the Drupal community. There's a big accessibility movement within the Drupal community, so that's good. Drupal 7, the new one, they're really working hard to make it accessible so that's cool.
Ross: Yeah, they're definitely putting effort in the right places, so hopefully that will turn out.
Dennis: So speaking of meetups and events, a week or so ago I attended my first BayJax Meetup, which is the Bay Area Ajax and JavaScript Meetup. I guess it's usually held at Yahoo!, so I was at Yahoo! Dirk Ginader was scheduled to speak, but he had a family emergency. He kindly asked me to fill in, so that was pretty cool. I gave a little presentation. Like in one day I whipped up a JavaScript and Accessibility [laughs] presentation and spoke, so that was pretty cool.
Ross: Yeah, that is cool. It seems like you could really give some real-world examples with accessible Twitter. You know, what you've done to make that accessible.
Dennis: Yeah, yeah. I did give a few examples using accessible Twitter. You can view the presentation on Web Axe. It's up on SlideShare, and I did make a real nice HTML-friendly text-only version. It's not the longest or greatest presentation, but it has a lot of the good basics, you now.
Ross: Probably make it start there and do your own research based on this?
Dennis: Exactly.
Ross: Very good, very good. And how is the Yahoo! Campus?
Dennis: Oh, very nice. It's kind of in an odd area, but the [laughs] campus itself is pretty nice, yeah. There's a few buildings and a nice fountain. The building that I was in, they had the cafeteria and there's game room in the back and a gym and everything. It was pretty cool.
Ross: Yeah, it's sound pretty nice.
Dennis: Switching gears, did you sign the petition for screen reader accessibility for Google Chrome?
Ross: I did. I did, and actually I must confess that I hadn't even come across it until I saw it on the show notes here.
Dennis: Oh, [laughs] really?
Ross: Yeah. So I'm definitely going to Tweet about it. Afterwords, I'll try and spread the word. I'm surprised that it just never came across my radar. I don't know if that was just blinders and missed it or what.
Dennis: Yeah. I don't think it's good to re-Tweet yourself very often. But I think once in a while if something's important it's OK to re-Tweet something because somebody in a different time zone could have missed it. I think this is important enough. I did re-Tweet it a couple times on Web Axe, but you must have missed it...
Ross: [laughs] Yeah.
Dennis: Because I know how closely you follow the Web Axe Twitter account.
Ross: [laughs] Very closely.
Dennis: That's right.
Ross: Yeah, I think as long as it's not self-promotion, then re-Tweeting stuff is much more acceptable. In this case you're Tweeting for something else, not your own.
Dennis: Yeah, so I'm not sure how many people have signed it. Actually, just yesterday I found out that they put up a page about the Chrome accessibility because supposedly before, the understanding was it wasn't screen reader accessible at all.
But Google did just now post a page about it. I think it's on the Chromium blog, and they explain the partial accessibility screen reader usage on Chrome and that they're apparently working on it. So that's a good sign. The accessibility community is getting traction.
Ross: Yeah, definitely. Definitely, especially if they're responding so quickly. It's a good sign people are making waves and companies are listening.
Dennis: And another example of that, bringing us to our next point, is the Web Axe blog on the CA.gov website accessibility page. The state of California website has a page talking about the site's accessibility. So I went through it and discovered that, well, number one, it wasn't written very well. And number two, a lot of the points that they made were either outdated or just weren't working on the site.
So I went through. The blog, if you haven't read it, goes through each point that they listed on the page and just replies to each one and unfortunately finds [laughs] some kind of mistake almost for every one.
Ross: [laughs]
Dennis: And like three working days later, guess what happens?
Ross: They fixed it?
Dennis: Well, they edited the page at least.
[laughter]
Dennis: They updated their accessibility page, which was a good start. I noticed they did fix at least one thing. Because the Skip To links weren't visible at all on the page, but now if you tap to it, it's visible, so that's at least a good start.
But somebody from working there, actually left a comment, on that blog, which was pretty cool. Actually, I think they left a comment on the follow up blog about it. So that was neat that they had acknowledged those issues. And they were really cool about it so.
Ross: Yeah, nice to know that they're paying attention. And even, if they don't make it perfect, at least they're making strides to improve, which is certainly better than nothing.
Dennis: Exactly. Yeah, every site is a work in progress, so nothing's ever perfect.
Ross: Right, right.
Dennis: Let's see. So another event I wanted to mention, just briefly, at the end of July, I will be in Indianapolis, Indiana, for the first time. And that should be cool, there's a conference called the Annual Assistive Technology Conference, from Easter Seals Crossroads. And I will be talking about Twitter and accessibility and accessible Twitter and all that good stuff. So that should be fun.
Ross: Great great.
Dennis: Have you've been to Indianapolis?
Ross: I haven't. It's one of those places I've always kind of wanted to go. But never made it out.
Dennis: Yeah, I've never been either so it should be interesting. I'll Twitt-Pic for you.
Ross: Yeah, it sounds good, sounds good. So if they had a conference in the Indy 500, kind of the same thing, just a week trip.
Dennis: Or a Superbowl or something.
Ross: Right, right. That will also work for me.
Dennis: OK, so, let's see, there's a few news articles we want to discuss.
Ross: Yup. It looks like we have an article from our friend Joe Dolson.
Dennis: Oh yeah. Did I put this on here?
Ross: I don't remember putting it on there, so I assume so.
Dennis: Yeah, there's a new, from the Paciello Group, there's a new web accessibility checker application. It's called aViewer. Joe Dolson blogged about it and it has a little write up about it. I guess what's different about it is that in addition to expecting our area, it dives into the DOM really well. I haven't tried it out myself, but I thought it was worth a mention. It's called the Accessibility Viewer Application Beta. So check it out.
Ross: It's just nice to see more tools, that are doing more to check, the dominant area. Because some of these sites now days, have such heavy JavaScript usage.
Dennis: Yeah, yeah. Seeing more and more of that, so that's good. And the Paciello Group is always on the ball in that arena, especially.
Ross: And then I came across a couple news articles that I thought were worth covering at Jimfacture.com. He has taken a look at government websites and how they, what they're doing with accessibility and how closely they're following the section 508, that sort of thing. And it's an interesting article that's kind of comparing how government use skip links now compared to how they've used them in the past. Are they doing it right or are they doing it better, that sort of thing. I guess he originally wrote an article about how skip links were being used a few years ago, and then revisited it. So it's interesting tee what they've done with there skip links and how it's changed, so that's certainly worth looking at.
And then he also wrote an article about how whitehouse.gov has been making strides to improve their accessibility. That's pretty interesting; we've ended up looking at quite a few government sites on this show. And evaluated how well they are being successful and that sort of thing, to see them making changes and becoming more successful it always nice. Just like your example earlier with the California government.
Dennis: Good, good I guess that takes care of the news and current events. So next up we have an interview with Deque Systems. Dylan Barrel and Brain Kerr.
Ross: Brain Kerr actually works out of the same office as I do. He was a freelance developer and then joined on with Deque systems and works remotely. And Dylan Barrel from Deque was the contact he had there and they are a company that does, accessibility tools and consulting, and they're working on a new tool called FireEyes.
Dennis: Cool that's a Firefox plugin that you'll be able to get very soon. And I think it is just for going into beta right now. So check out the links on the show notes and check it out. So here it is. Dennis and myself, and Ross and Dylan and Brain.
[new segment]
We have two more people on the line; we have Dylan Barrel and Brain Kerr. Welcome, guys.
Dylan Barrel: Thank you, thank you, Dennis. Great to be here.
Brian Kerr: Hello.
Dennis: Brian, Dylan, glad you could join us on another Skype Web Axe conversation. So I guess we will go to Dylan first, you are VP of product development, right, I understand, at Deque Systems. And could you tell us a little bit about yourself and the company.
Dylan: Yes I'm VP of product development, but that doesn't stop me from fixing bugs and running code. We're a small company. But we've been around for a long time in the accessability space. I think we were one of the first companies to create an automated test tools. And we do, in addition to our products which are a lot of automated testing. We do a lot of services to help companies actually remediate and fix their web applications, websites, etc. So we've been around from 2000, I think, was when the company was founded.
Dennis: Oh OK.
Ross: Deque actually does consulting with work with companies that have accessibility needs?
Dylan: Yes we do, so our companies half of consulting and products. And I myself am a computer science graduate. Grew up in South Africa. And I'm just about to go to the World Cup.
Dennis: That' awesome. So I know Brian's in Ann Arbour. Are you in Ann Arbour, Michigan?
Dylan: I'm in Ann Arbour as well. Living in Ann Arbour, have been for the last 10 years.
Dennis: And Ross is in Ann Arbour of course. And I used to be in Ann Arbour. Go blue!
Dylan: Go blue [laughter]
Dennis: The reason we have Deque Systems on this podcast is because there are about to launch a Firefox add-on helping test web accessibility, which is awesome. Brian, can you give us a little background on yourself and how long you've been with the company?
Brian: Yeah, sure. I'm actually a new employee. So, prior to working for Deque, I was a computer science dropout. I have a human-computer interaction degree. Stuff like that. Basically, I just came in on contract to start working on this particular product. So I did that for a while, and then I came on as an employee. So it's been since about February, March, we ramped this up.
So I actually don't know that much about Deque Systems, the company. But in terms of what's going on in Deque Labs and this project, that's pretty much all I've been working on, both in terms of my own [inaudible 17:55] and also as an employee of the company. I've just been in Ann Arbor for over a decade, and it's kind of funny, Dylan and I are here and a lot of the other... So, Dylan, how many people are in the main office in Reston, versus being distributed elsewhere?
Dylan: I don't actually know, I go there so infrequently. But, I think it's about ten people that are in that office, and then the rest of them are working on-site at customers. But, I don't really know.
Dennis: So, FireEyes is the name of this add-on, correct?
Dylan: The name of the product is actually called Worldspace FireEyes. Worldspace is the product suite name for most of the Deque products. And this is one of the suite of tools that we make available for developers and content creators.
Dennis: Oh, OK. So can you tell us about these other tools, just briefly?
Dylan: Well, this is a little bit of a different tool from the other ones because this is the first one we're actually making available for free. So, it's going to be a free download that anybody can use. The idea being that you can only really get rid of the accessibility issues if you get it at the source, where the applications are being created. So that's really our aim here, is to get this out there and get it in the hands of as many developers and designers as possible. So that's why we're giving it away for free.
But we have a lot of other products that integrate into other things like Dreamweaver, into Eclipse, into products like Quality Center from HP. So we have a lot of plugins that integrate the Worldspace functionality into the places that are best when used by developers, by content creators, or by quality assurance engineers.
Dennis: OK. Let's see. Today's Friday. Oh, go ahead, Ross.
Ross: So I'm not sure if we covered this or not, but FireEyes is a plugin for Firefox, but more specifically for Firebug. It's an add-on for Firebug, which is a popular web developer plugin. I was curious, what was the decision process to end up at using Firebug as a platform versus building something cross-browser, or something specifically for Firefox but didn't depend on Firebug?
Dylan: Well, the biggest decision factor there, when we started this out -- and Brian will tell you this, too -- the first version of this was a Firefox extension. The reason we did it as a Firefox extension, first and foremost, is there are certain things you can do inside the browser, in the trusted mode as an extension that you cannot do in any other way. So, that was the reason that we made it an extension. And the reason that we made it a Firebug extension was because, well, first of all, Firebug is the most widely used developer tool out there for developers of web applications.
Ross: Yeah, right.
Dylan: So, we knew that everybody was using it anyway. And secondly a lot of the functionality we knew that people need when they're fixing accessibility issues, Firebug already provides. So, if we had done it as a standalone extension, we would've had to duplicate a lot of the functionality that Firebug has.
So, we decided, well, everybody we're aiming this at already has Firebug and, it provides a lot of stuff that we would've had to develop ourselves, so, why not just do the additional stuff. So, develop the stuff that is sort of unique to what we do, the accessibility functionality, and then integrate it with the functionality that Firebug provides.
Ross: Yeah, it seems like that's a great approach. I mean, not just from the duplication standpoint, but just sort of having it all in one tool. I mean, I tend to switch between Firebug and then the web developer toolbar. And, I mean it's not a huge hassle, but it's kind of inconvenient to have to use one or the other versus having everything all in one place.
Dylan: Yeah, that's exactly what we thought as well, you know. Better to make it integrated in there and inside the toolbar and use it. And we've tried to develop most of the code such that we could, a) do similar things with Chrome or a similar thing for an Internet Explorer in the future. But in the end a lot of the code is still very dependent. And we may make it available in other browsers in the future.
Ross: Is this going to be released as an open source project at some point?
Dylan: Right now, we've decided not to. We talked about that a lot. We wanted it to be free. I mean that was most important to us. We didn't want there to be any barriers to somebody using this and somebody being able to get the benefit from the product.
But Deque hasn't done a lot of open source stuff up until now. So it was a little bit of a big hurdle for us to go that extra step. And we may open source it in the future. But for now, we've decided not to.
Dennis: So it's Father's Day weekend. I'm not sure how soon I'm going to get the podcast up. But I understand next week you're actually going to be releasing the product. Can you tell us specifically when and where people can get it?
Dylan: Well the product is going to official beta next week. These days, beta is the new release. It looks like 40B30, right? So our first beta, which means basically it's almost production level code. There's obviously going to be bugs in it. And there's a lot of features that we wanted to implement which we haven't done yet and we will.
So it's going to go into beta around the middle of next week, which is around the 23rd, 24th. Somewhere around there. It's going to be released on our website.
Dennis: Of June, of course.
Dylan: Of June, of course. For those people listening to this sometime who knows in the future.
Dennis: I'll try to get the podcast up.
Dylan: 2010, 2010.
Dennis: Yeah. Hopefully I'll get the podcast up by at least Wednesday.
Dylan: And then we are going to be doing a series of betas before we call it the first official production release. So there will be at least one more, maybe two more, three more betas. We will be adding features and adding capabilities and fixing bugs, of course, before the product goes into official release one.
Dennis: OK. And where will people be able to get it?
Dylan: People will be able to download it at Deque.com. That's www.deque.com/worldspace-fireeyes. So if you go to that URL you will be able to sign up and download the program.
Dennis: OK. And of course we will put all the links on the show notes.
Ross: Yeah. I would love to hear some of the features. For those that don't know, Brian actually works in the same office that I do. So I've kind of been able to hear him talk about some of the things it does. And really does some pretty amazing things that no other accessibility testing tool that I've seen, even comes close. But I'm not sure of what features have been finished and added or not. So, what are some of the top highlights in terms of what the tool does?
Dylan: Well, I mean Brian can maybe talk about his favorite features as a developer. But there are some things that we've done that haven't been done at all by any plugins or by any products, not just accessibility products.
I think the important thing for us is we feel like accessibility has been treated like sort of the redheaded child, or stepchild. In that there are products, a few products, out there, but they haven't been very easy to use. And so, we wanted to focus on ease of use as the first thing. We wanted this to be really nice and interactive and good to use and easy to use. That was one of our first priorities.
So, even though some of the features that we have are in other plugins or in other products, we felt like we took that usability a step further. So, the fact that we overlay every element that has issues in a browser, if you're sighted of course, you can see that overlay in the screen. And you can interact between that and the issues that appear in the plugin viewer itself.
You know, all the way to the ability to dynamically filter based on tag types and issue types and all sorts of things. So that you can really dynamically look at the list of issues, events, and changes that you've captured inside the plugin. You know, we've just tried to make it interactive, responsive, and easy to use. That was the first thing.
Second of all, there isn't a product out there which can really do dynamic analysis so that as things are happening, JavaScript is changing the page. We monitor everything that's going on. And we look for patterns. So, we can, for example, detect when modal content appears on the page and the focus doesn't go back after that modal content disappears. We can detect that sort of thing going on in the browser. And we can tell the developer that, hey, after this modal content went away, you should have reset the focus to this element because that's what the user is expecting.
So, there are certain things there that we can do based on our monitoring all the events, changes, and things going on in the browser that nobody has done up until now in any type of product at all. So, I'll hand over to Brian. He hasn't said anything, now. But maybe he can talk about some of the features he thinks are really cool, as a developer.
Brian: Yeah, well, I mean, the way to think about it is that this is something that you install it, get it set up, and then it's basically just part of Firebug. And so, any page you're working on you just make sure that Firebug is enabled.
And then your sort of entry point to actually using it is you can basically turn on this track box that says please check for various accessibility issues or potential issues just as I interact with this website or web app. And so, what it'll end up doing is it actually can also record all of the events that you go through.
So, in other words, as you go to sort of log into your web app or searching through a search box and Ajaxy things are happening on the page, FireEyes will actually do sort of an analysis in the background, if you ask it to. But, I mean, that's the mode I like to use it in. It'll do this analysis in the background and just generate giant lists of these issues, violations, potential issues. Because some of them you have to verify manually.
And for me, as sort of a biographical sidebar, I feel like it's worth mentioning, is that I have a hearing impairment. So I wear hearing aids, and I have all this junk that I have to wire up in order to, for example, get on a podcast or talk on the phone. So I'm sort of cognizant of some of that stuff, just sort of like a frame that you bring into using the computer or interacting with other people's software or applications.
And the thing that I really like about FireEyes is it gives you this sense of just accumulating all these different issues and telling you what they are, where they are in the source code. It's a combination of some things that are easy to get from other products, like you can just do a static analysis and look at the markup on the page and say, hey, this markup is wrong, or you're missing various attributes, or you're not using it properly. That kind of basic stuff.
Then FireEyes will also do some of this more advanced stuff, like the drag and drop and the color analysis and so forth. But the thing that I like about it is that you can just tell it what kind of issues you want it to look for, and it'll accumulate them as you use the web. I've even gotten into the habit of just leaving it open while I'm reading the news or reading magazine articles and so forth. Because it just gives you the sense of here's an additional kind of layer of information about what's going on in this web document, and I really like that.
In terms of the bullet point features, there's all kinds of stuff. But I think what's special about it and what I've really come to like about it is just the pattern of how easy it is to, once you get the software up and running, just go in, turn it on, and see what issues get generated. It's obviously really interesting if it's something that you are personally responsible for, like if it's something you're doing for your job or a contract or a side project or something. But it's also just interesting generically, to just see what sites do better than others and what kind of issues are really prevalent.
Dennis: Yeah, that would be cool, especially if you're in the web accessibility arena. It's be very interesting how all the different sites you use measure up.
Dylan: Yeah, so that's one of the things that we really want to do with accessibility as a company and me, personally. Accessibility testing is always something that's done extra at the end of the project. One of the key things about this product for us was we want to make it easy for developers or QA engineers to just have accessibility testing turned on. Just install the plugin, and every time you test your product for features, it's testing for accessibility on the site. You just click into the tab, and now you see all the issues. And you don't have to do anything extra. That was the key. You don't have to do anything extra except look at the issues that it's generated for you.
Dennis: Yeah, that's awesome.
Dylan: I think Brian nailed it on the head. What this does is it almost makes it more difficult not to go and fix those issues. And that's where we want to get to. As Deque's kind of tag line, "ending website discrimination", that's how we do it is we make it more difficult not to do the right thing.
Dennis: Good, good. Brian, can you tell us the system requirements, like which versions of Firefox? I came to find out, before we started the interview, Java has to be running properly in Firefox.
Brian: Yeah. From my perspective -- and Dylan can stop me if this is something I'm not really supposed to say -- I feel like, for this beta, that's actually one of the rougher parts of this. All of these requirements are on the website, which I guess we will have launched by the time this goes out. The short version is you need Firefox 3.5 or higher, so that's basically the current release or the previous release that's out there. You need to have Firebug 1.5, which is the current release, and you need to have Java Runtime Engine set up so you can run Java applets.
And, the reason for that third thing is, basically in order to keep the performance of all this. Because, I mean, it's almost ridiculous how much work that FireEyes is doing in the background. You know, if you do have this sort of, what we call the automatic analysis, where it's always looking for issues just passively as you use the web. That's actually in, sort of, a multiprocess kind of, or multicredit kind of world, so that all that can happen, and your browser doesn't just lock up, you know?
So, basically that's the need for Java. And so, once you get those things set up, it's pretty smooth sailing. Although, I will confess it's a little bit rough just getting that all set up at this point. I mean, for a lot of people, it's a really typical system configuration. But if you don't have it, then you have to go install multiple plugins, and stuff like that. And it works, we've done some cross-platform testing on, let's see, Windows XP, and Windows 7, and a couple of different versions of the Mac OS X.
So it's reasonably cross-platform. I bet that somebody that understands the status of running Java applets on Linux better than I do could get it working on Linux. There's no reason it shouldn't work. I haven't really figured that out, so I'm kind of hoping that we can figure out how to do that.
Dennis: OK.
Brian: But if you meet those basic requirements, then it's something that just, sort of, could be part of your browser. It's not that big of a deal.
Dennis: Yeah, it sounds like something most developers would have set up already.
Ross: Right, that's what I was going to say, the type of person using this probably has those components, or would know how to do it fairly easily. The kind of, speaking to the, one thing that Brian had mentioned, how much work the application is doing, I mean, he was describing kind of the process of how they did the color monitoring, checking for color contrasts and that sort of thing, and just the process that that went through. I was kind of amazed, and it sounds like it does all that in the background?
Dylan: Yeah, no, the color analysis actually is not in the background. And the reason for that is, well, because we do do analysis in the background automatically, what it does is, every time anything happens, the DOM changes, or some content gets updated in the page, we're analyzing that.
And the color contrast analysis actually, in order to work correctly, and in order to do the analysis with and without CSS, and in order to correctly find the background of the elements, actually has to modify the DOM. And if we did that in the background, it would continually be in an infinite loop. It would be doing the analysis, and as the analysis would update the DOM, and so then we would try and analyze that again.
And so what we actually ended up doing is, there is a version of the color contrast analysis which happens in the background but it's very kind of light version, but we have a color contrast button that you can hit, and it'll do, it does the most, it does the best color contrast analysis that's out there. It will even find the correct background and foreground contrast where the two elements, the background doesn't live in the same tree as the foreground element.
So, you basically have done absolute positioning in your document, and you position one element outside of its parent into another element, it'll find the correct background and that. It'll find the correct background on elements that actually have images in the back, and calculate the contrast correctly. So, if you've got an image that's the background of something, it'll calculate the contrast in that correctly. And so, and it does this correctly with CSS and without CSS. So, Juicy Studio has a very good color contrast analyzer, but they can't do a couple of things that we can do, for example.
Dennis: OK. Well, FireEyes...
Ross: Is it taking into account transparent PNG's and that sort of thing?
Dylan: It takes all that into account, absolutely. Because we're actually - I don't want to give away the secrets. But we're actually doing some really, really sexy stuff to figure out what the background is.
Dennis: Yeah, I can see how that would be tricky. Well FireEyes sounds like a great tool. I want to wind down the conversation. Brian, did you have any last comments?
Brian: Not anything beyond this one point, which I feel like we should mention that there's also something that is really kind of fun to play with, which is that you can... A lot of these issues - and this is something that is definitely unique to FireEyes, and it's also something that has been really hard to get working, but it's kind of amazing and it's kind of like science fiction that it exists, which is the ability to freeze a page. What that means is that a lot of accessibility issues can be located in stuff that's like a transient content. I think Dylan actually has a video on the website already about this, so go kind of see how this would work.
But if you're typing something into a search bar and it auto-completes using Ajax, then once you submit the search form that auto-completion goes away. Well, FireEyes can actually find issues in that. But you can also have it replay to that specific issues, and then also just freeze the entire document so that you can then go and actually inspect that in FireBug and see what the markup is that came out of it.
Dennis: Ah, very cool.
Brian: Yeah. That sort of thing. It's actually pretty decent for just figuring out when those issues appear and disappear from a page, right? I'm very guilty of this, as somebody who was primarily a web developer before I started working on this web developing tool of creating effects-ware, something that's only on screen for a couple of seconds.
Before FireEyes, there was really no way to tell whether that's accessible without asking somebody. I feel like that's always the best way to find out. But it's not always practical, especially for somebody who is just doing the weekend project. So, that's all I've got. I'm really excited about it.
Dennis: OK. Dylan, any last words?
Dylan: I think we really want the community to get engaged with this product. And we'd love to hear, as I said, we wanted to make it easy to use. We wanted to make it engaging. And we wanted to push the envelope. And we'd just love to get feedback from the whole accessibility community on how we've done, where we've hit the mark, where we've missed the mark, and where the envelope needs further pushing.
Because that's what we want to do with this product is we want to push the envelope. So, just a request out there to everybody to download it, use it, criticize it. You know, if you want to love it then love it. [laughs] And help us make it better.
Dennis: Yeah, feedback is very important. So, where will they be able to give feedback?
Dylan: Once again, on our website we will have a forum where they can post comments and get back to us.
Dennis: OK, great. Ross?
Ross: I guess my final thoughts would just be that it's been pretty fun to just sort of hear the story of how this tool evolved. You know, again Brian has been working on it out of the same offices as my company. So, from him describing this project that he might part of to the point where it's actually about to be released has been pretty cool.
Dennis: Yeah, it sounds exciting. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to using it. I've just got to fix my little Java issue and I'll be on my way, so. Well, thanks for joining us you guys and for taking the time Brian and Dylan.
Brian: Thank you very much, Dennis. Thanks, Ross.
Ross: Thanks, guys.
[music and commercial]
[END]