We’re happy to announce the beta release of the WAVE Firefox toolbar. You can download and install the toolbar at http://wave.webaim.org/toolbar.

The toolbar processes web content as it appears within the Firefox browser and does not rely upon server processing to generate a WAVE report. This allows secure evaluation of password protected, intranet, dynamically generated, or sensitive web pages. Because the WAVE toolbar evaluates the rendered version of your page, locally displayed styles and dynamically-generated content from scripts or AJAX can be evaluated.

This is very much a beta release. A few key features are missing in this version that will be made available in a future release in the coming weeks:

• The icon tooltips that provide additional information about the WAVE icons are not present. However, alt and title text for the icons do provide a brief overview of what the icon is indicating. Additionally, a toolbar button will display the full icons key in a new tab.
• Page-wide icons (such as those for missing page title, meta refresh, etc.) do not display.
• There is no option to disable styles, though the WAVE toolbar can be used in conjunction with the Web Developer or other toolbars to remove the document styles and leave the WAVE icons in place.
• There is not a direct indication of how many (if any) accessibility errors are in the document. You must scan for red icons to see if there are obvious errors.

Again, all of these features will be implemented into the toolbar in the near future. Additionally, we will soon have full Firefox 3 support.

We have lots of ideas for the WAVE toolbar, but would appreciate any feedback, bug reports, or recommendations you have. You can either post a comment below or use the feedback form.