In a second article on the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser Patrick H. Lauke describes how to use Chris Pederick's Web Developer Toolbar Add on to start to evaluate a web site's accessibility.

Although it's a couple of years old it is still very useful for a first pass and has also appeared mirrored on the WebAIM site.

I'd like to see basic accessibility checking added to the console output of the rather wonderful FireBug.

Thanks To Aaron Leventhal for pointing this out. 

According to Groklaw and spotted by UK Open Source Media Watch 19 nations responded with objections to the fastrack attempt. Here's the list of objections on Groklaw.

Meanwhile ODF 1.1 has been accepted as a standard and noticably with much input on accessibility from the community of users.

Sun do the job that Microsoft didn't, as described in the press release. It's a preview for text documents only and  doesn't support spreadsheets or presentations  but does mean that companies can enjoy the freedom of ODF and assistive technology users can carry on as usual.

The Open Document Foundation announced work on a plugin a while back but nothing is yet available. However the delay has meant that a lot of good quality AT is appearing that supports Open Source office software as well as other applications. In particular IBM's IAccessible2 Accessibility API improves support for Assistive Technology on Windows and brings it into line with support on Linux.

It appears that unlike Microsoft's ODF Converter translator this is fully integrated into word.

It is not yet clear what the licence will be, especially as it is being promoted as part of the commercial Star Office rather than the related open source Open Office.