PowerMapper Software Blog

The latest quarterly PowerMapper and SortSite maintenance releases are now available.

New features include:

• BlackBerry, Firefox 5 and Chrome 12 added to browser compatibility tests
• Autocomplete for forms
• Enhanced spell checking options

These are available to all customers with active support and maintenance contracts via the Update Watch feature in each application.

SortSite OnDemand has just been updated for all subscribers. New features in this release include:

• Mobile browser compatibility checks for BlackBerry
• Added Firefox 5 and Chrome 12 to browser compatibility tests
• Added self-service password recovery
• Added delete scans and delete scan history
• Added scope option to quick scan on home page

• Expand All button in reports was slow on large sites with lots of errors
• Correctly handle pages that specify different charsets in HTTP headers and META tags
• Handle windows-1256 (Arabic) character set correctly in rules
• Fixed false positives and false negatives

I had the privilege of visiting the Shaw Trust's accessibility testing center recently. The Shaw Trust is a UK charity which supports disabled and disadvantaged people prepare for work, find jobs and live more independently. As part of their work they provide accessibility testing services to a range of organizations worldwide.

Their accessibility testing team employs people with a range of disabilities, using different assistive technologies. This means their testing is very thorough and sets a gold standard for the rest of the accessibility community. The commitment and enthusiasm of the team was inspirational, and watching them at work really brings home the challenges and obstacles some websites present.

For the past month or so we've been working hard to get SortSite Certified for Windows Vista.

This involves testing against a slew of test cases which makes sure your application plays well with Windows, including Restart Manager support, which means SortSite saves and restores current state if an overnight restart occurs (usually as the result of Windows applying automatic updates on the first Tuesday of every month).

After a few weeks of internal testing against Microsoft's "Certified for Vista" test specification, we submitted our application to VeriTest last week. VeriTest are an independent testing lab and authorized Microsoft certification tester - they ensure submitted applications comply with Microsoft's test cases.

We just received our test results from VeriTest this morning - first time pass.

Part of the our sales strategy for 2009 is expanding our reseller program. In January we signed up Dell, Compucom and QBS Software.

We're always on the lookout for new resellers, and offer generous discounts for volume sales.

Last week we released SortSite 3.1. The main theme of this release was expanded browser compatibility rules.

We now have a lot more checks for incompatible CSS, HTML and JavaScript - as well as adding support for Google Chrome. We've reorganized the compatibility summary so you can now see at a glance which browsers a site works in.

Other features in this release include: page weight checks; new accessibility summary; and greatly reduced memory consumption on large sites (up to 75% less memory in some cases).

On Dec 11th 2008 the W3C released the long awaited WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines. The first draft was published in Jan 2001, so they've been 8 years in the making. For comparison, it took NASA 8.5 years from Kennedy's 1961 speech to land a man on the moon.

On Dec 16th 2008 Electrum released SortSite 3.0, the first commercial accessibility tool to support the final W3C WCAG2 recommendation.

In addition to support for WCAG2 there's been a host of user interface improvements, including the ability to set a corporate web site quality policy and share that with co-workers.

We shipped the SortSite 2.07 maintenance release earlier this month.

Changes include a new scheduler, improved performance (up to 10x faster on some sites) and fixes for a number of false positives reported by users.

Fortunately false positives are pretty rare - we only see 3 or 4 reports a month. Any user can report a problem using the Report Broken Rule menu option - we log these and endeavor to fix them in the next maintenance release (although anything reported in the week before a release is usually deferred to the next release).

We've just released SortSite 2.03 with a feature many of you have been asking for: export to Word RTF.

RTF is supported by all major word processors, including Word and OpenOffice. This allows you to add value to the reports by exporting them, then editing them in Word to add your own logo and executive summary. You can then print or PDF them before presenting them to your customers.