Review - LIFT Nielsen Norman Group Edition

Web Accessibility has become an important consideration for many Web designers of late. Government-affiliated sites in the US must now conform to Section 508 accessibility guidelines, while the W3C has produced its own set of guidelines for all Web designers. But on top of these technical standards, there are plenty of other things that can be done to make a site more usable for the disabled, as outlined in the Nielsen Norman Group's recent report: Beyond ALT Text: Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities.

If you use Macromedia Dreamweaver/UltraDev 4.x or MX for your Web design work, LIFT - Nielsen Norman Group edition (LIFT - NN/g) is a powerful tool that bundles both standards and all the recommendations from the Nielsen Norman Group report into an automated tool that will blend right into your workflow.

A Dreamweaver extension, LIFT - NN/g adds a palette of dockable windows to the program. These windows let you check your work for accessibility problems in one of two ways:

• Evaluate: this mode lets you run a check of one or more pages (or your entire site), and correct any problems in a handy wizard that offers to explain each usability problem in detail if you need it to.
• Monitor: this works just like the Evaluate mode, but it monitors your work in real time instead of checking it all at once. Problems are pointed out to you as you make them in an unobtrusive list, which gives you the same wizard interface to fix them at your convenience.

The set of guidelines that LIFT - NN/g checks is completely configurable. You can selectively enable and disable individual guidelines, select sets of guidelines (W3C, 508, usability, etc.), or create your own custom sets. Custom sets of guidelines can be saved and copied to other computers, which makes LIFT - NN/g ideal for coordinating accessibility guidelines between members of a design team.

Unlike other tools of this type that can be tedious and inflexible, I found LIFT NN/g meshed really well with my workflow. Don't ask me how, but LIFT - NN/g is able to suggest appropriate corrections for accessibility problems based on context. For instance, it's able to tell when an image tag is a spacer image and instead of prompting for a description of the image, it offers to insert an empty alt attribute (alt="").

Convenient features like an alt attribute editor, which gives you a unified interface to edit all the alt attributes in your document or site from a single window, and a report generator, which can output accessibility reports in HTML or XML, are just icing on the cake. If you use Dreamweaver and accessibility is a concern for you, LIFT - NN/g is a must-have.

About the only complaint I have about the software is its inflexible interface. Each of the panels has fixed sized contents. For example, the "Monitor" tab above can be made smaller or larger, but the list of issues and the positions of the buttons remain fixed; therefore, making it any smaller causes the interface to become unusable and making it any bigger only wastes space on your screen. Spot the irony. These sizing issues may be a limitation of the JavaScript Extension technology that was used to create LIFT - NN/g, but in any case they are more than a little distracting.

LIFT - NN/g is available now for US$549 from UsableNet's Web site. LIFT for Macromedia Dreamweaver (which checks W3C and Section 508 accessibility only, and lacks a few of the more advanced wizards of LIFT - NN/g) is available for US$299. LIFT for Microsoft Frontpage is also available for US$299.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group in an interview, and made a point of asking him a few questions about LIFT - NN/g. Read on to find out what he had to say...