Web Accessibility Toolbar for Internet Explorer

The Web Accessibility Toolbar for Internet Explorer is very similar to Mozilla's Web Developer Toolbar.

It is provided by the Accessible Information Solutions (AIS) team at the National Information and Library Service (NILS) , Australia. The Web Accessibility Toolbar has been developed to aid manual examination of web pages for a variety of aspects of accessibility. It consists of a range of functions that:

• identify components of a web page
  
• facilitate the use of 3rd party online applications
  
• simulate user experiences
  
• provide links to references and additional resources

A list of functions that include toggling stylesheets, code validation, display headings, image lists, disabling images, color functions, page resize, page zoom, accessibility simulations for color blindness, cataracts, & other sight impairments, and a whole lot more can be found here.

This site also has an impressive listing of tools and references for accessibility that is worth looking at too.

Seraphim Proudleduck - The UK Nigritude Ultramarine

In the wake of the Nigritude Ultramarine contest, Salmonbones is sponsoring the Seraphim Proudleduck Challenge which is offering a Grand Prize of £1000 and two runners-up prizes of £300 and £200.

One caveat to this contest is that the rankings will be taken from Google UK. The Salmonbones site is enlisting the aid of independant UK Residents to be part of the verification team.

Found via SEbasic's Seraphim Proudleduck blog.

Firefox: One Millionth Download Mark Reached

Downloads for the Preview Release of Firefox 1.0 cranked out at the rate of 100K per hour in the first four days to put them at the 1 Million mark.

"This is the fastest adoption rate we have ever experienced, higher than every previous Firefox release."

Dang, that is cooking!

Via Spread Firefox

Gmail Invite Spooler

A new clearinghouse service for Gmail invites is being offered at isnoop.net. The program dubbed as the Gmail Invite Spooler (or Gmailomatic), has been in action since September 13th and already distributed close to 24,000 invites. This works out to well over 3,300 per day since its inception.

Via Aaron Swartz's Google Weblog.

Google's New PageRank Checksum is Cracked

This did not take long. The folks who cracked (and released) the last toolbar checksum are at it again. See the continuing thread at MobileRead Networks.

One of the MobileRead members, traB, has code you can insert on your webpages that will display both toolbar checksum values side by side. Any variations in the two will be easily spotted.

A new member to this forum is reporting differences between the old and new versions of the googlebar. He has these installed on separate computers. This has not been verified by anyone else yet, so I will leave that up in the air for now. If this is true, then that would mean there was a PR update that took place -- nobody would have noticed it unless they have the new version of the toolbar installed.

PageRank Missing from New Google Toolbar?

If you haven't seen the new Google Toolbar image at Google, take a look at what is missing from it. Yep, the PageRank meter is gone.

I am almost positive that it is not missing from the actual toolbar that you can install (I still have the old version). People who have it installed have mentioned it being there. It is just odd that it is missing from the graphic on this page.

Just file this in your wierd stuff about Google folder.

Yahoo Slurp Garbling Mac Encoded Pages

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Microsoft Doorway Pages - Caught Spam Handed

Bhartzer over at WebProWorld posted an article that catches Microsoft red handed with the creation of doorway pages. The pages in question involve their Asian portal which redirects you to their Solution Marketplace using a little bit of JavaScript.

The article only cited 4 examples of this activity, but after I checked into it there are close to 600 pages of this section in the Google index. Most of the terms are hitting number one (I just did some random checks, not too extensive). It is not known if there are more divisions at Microsoft.com that are using this same technique.

Flood6, a moderator at WPW ponders

"Yeah, I'm sure that if google is aware of this, the decision on what to do is being made by someone fairly important at G.

If I were making the decision and there are fewer than 100 MS pages doing this, I would just axe those pages (and the pages they redirect to)."

I would imagine that they would filter out the doorway pages and let the other pages that were redirected to stand on their own. Just another method of filtering to add to the list.

Not wanting to get into the whole spam controversy, and whether they will be banned or not banned, I am content to see how those pages will play out in the next week or two after Google picks up on the thread.

I was more interested in how Yahoo was treating it. One interesting thing is that these pages must have a 'no cache' directive, because the results are not showing the link for it. The same holds true over at Yahoo Search as well.

So how is Microsoft fairing on Yahoo? Apparently not too well. Again I did some precursory checks, and they were not even showing up in the top 100 for those terms.

Of course, Yahoo is not carrying nearly as many of these pages as Google is. What else is new? But they are not banning them outright either, Yahoo is showing a mere 70+ pages in total. This is about par for the course IMO.

It is good to see that Yahoo is not playing favorites in the 'where are my pages' game. They seem to be treating Microsoft just like the rest of the website owners who are still waiting for 3 month old pages to be indexed. Perhaps they should sign up for SiteMatch and get their pages indexed to remain competitive in Yahoo Search.