I'm doing some accessability testing on a site that's going to be mentioned in a major financial magazine. I've used browser cam and all looks good on virtuall everything, except it sends me a blank capture back on mac os 10 safari. If anyone can test this out for me it'd be greatly appreciated.
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Sticky me the url, you don't need a mac, all you need is a bootable cdrom of a kde based linux distro, Konqueror and Safari have basically the same codebase, KHTML. Those are known as 'live cds', because you can run them live, without installing Linux on your hardware, it's very convenient.

Good bootable cd KDE distros include Kanotix (my personal favorite), Mepis, and recently, Kubuntu.

These cds will all run off your cd rom drive, sometimes certain graphics cards won't run without drivers, nvidia often have that problem, mepis probably has the most support, but it's cluttered. Kubuntu is the only one I've tried that supported my radeon 7000 card without any tweaks.

KDE uses Konqueror as their default browser, which means you can essentially test for Safari by booting into your linux cd and loading the site. Most of these also set up your network automatically, so it's all ready to go.
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thanks..you got a pm.

i dont trust cr#p on my current machine. i'm still running an old 1.6ghz p4 with 640mb of PC800 RD Ram. i'm saving up to do a really big upgrade. i'm thinking i might tough it out til the release of the next windows os.
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"i dont trust cr#p on my current machine. i'm still running an old 1.6ghz p4 with 640mb of PC800 RD Ram"

Linux live cd's don't do a thing to your machine, it's all in ram, there is zero affect on anything on the hard drive, it's installed into what's called a ram virtual disk, and that's the only place it lives, when you turn the machine off, everything is gone.

As long as you don't access any files on your hard drive, which you can do if you want, nothing will be changed in any way, try it, you'll be surprised, live cds work very well.


If you wait 6 months to a year, 64 bit hardware will be cheaper, and the various flavors of 64 bit OS's will work better, I think even Windows has a 64 bit system out now, finally.
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Site looks fine, by the way, exactly the same as in Firefox. Safari/Konqueror/KHTML's main errors tend to show up in more extreme CSS, and can popup anywhere with Javascript, for example, last I tested, the simplest javascript, .focus(), which sets focus on a form element, simply didn't work. That's where KHTML is really weak.

But this site looks identical, that's the payoff for using clean and reasonably simple techniques.

Give the live cds a try, I'd recommend maybe kubuntu just because they have pretty good hardware support, maybe not quite as good as mepis, varies version to version. Just make sure you grab the live and not the install cd, in kanotix and mepis, it's the same cd, it just boots as live, then you can install it once booted if you want.

I checked it with ELinks browser too, that's a console browser, supports tables and some color stuff, site looks fine in that too, that's how real accessibility testing is done, no graphics, what does the user see. All looks good. Elinks is cool, part of the Lynx [probably oldest browser out there currently], family, along with Links, Links2, and W3M.
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Yea I try to stay away from using javascript for anything that's absolutely necessary for the function of the site. Lately i've been trying to design so that even with images, css or both disabled the site is still very usable. I always test in lynx. I even have a webtv testing console (you'd be amazed that people still use it), but i haven't tried that yet.

I just had to add some thing to the site this morning and the boss wanted me to tighten it up. Unfortunately the first time I banged this site out, it was kind of a rush job. So there were inline styles everywhere...what a pain in the a#s. bugs everywhere. It's still not as clean as i've like it to be (under the hood). But it will have to do. I have about 8-10 sites on my to do list. It's almost overwhelming.


btw Re: the set focus on forms, that feature should be fine even with js disabled.
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I have, you'd be very depressed at what you saw, web tv totally messed up, they accept css that they can't process, makes the pages completely self destruct if they use positioned css, very unpleasant to see. On one site, the first page loads reasonably ok, no css, gray on black, like it's supposed to, but on the next, it tries to import the css, with catastrophic results.

It's very funny, I will never understand why anyone bought a web tv set, it's total junk, you can buy a decent used computer for what those cost, which will be 10 times better, and probably 10 times faster. Web TV has to win the prize as the Edsel of the computer generation [if that's going back to far, the edsel was a car delivered with great fanfare, I think in the 50's, but which was just plain ugly, and bombed in the market totally, and became a term, an edsel means a clunker, a loser]. And of course, MS had to own a piece of that winner....
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well because the main chunk of the home page i sent you is done in a pretty clean table, I expect it to remain pretty stable. the content pages, who knows. i'm thinking it can't be that terrible.
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