The National Center on Disability and Access to Education - external link is a federally funded project based at the Utah State University, the home of WebAIM. WebAIM and NCDAE collaborate on a number of accessibility projects and initiatives. WebAIM provides support for NCDAE web casts and administers the accessibility of their web site. NCDAE has funded initial development of CaptionCaster and funded development of a beta version of a WAVE Firefox toolbar. The goals of both projects is very similar, though NCDAE focuses on the broader aspect of distance education technologies, policy development, and collaboration with distance education entities.
While this work continues, we have the following vision for WAVE development:
* Develop a full-featured, standalone WAVE toolbar extension for Firefox. This toolbar will provide all functionality of the web-based WAVE tool, but processing will be done locally on the client computer allowing WAVE analysis of intranet or password protected pages and offline evaluation.
* Reconfigure the web-based version of WAVE to allow continued development in an easier-to-develop framework.
* Re-evaluate WAVE evaluation rules to ensure that WAVE is providing the most thorough reporting available.
* Improve the WAVE reporting mechanism to allow better feedback and analysis.
* Expand WAVE to allow site-wide spidering and auditing capabilities - to be integrated with WebAIM's accessibility monitoring and reporting service.
