• 301, a web page is moved permanently
• 302, a web page is moved temporarily

• “Redirect” is a command to Apache web server
• “301″ redirect HTTP code
• “/” is a path on the local web server to forward. In our case “/” means all files on the truwex.com will be redirected. This parameter could be a file name. “/index.html”, for inctance
• “http://www.erigami.com/truwex/” is a full target URL

Client side or browser redirect

How Redirects improve a Web Site

Easy to remember URLs for marketing

Integrate several domains into one website

Keep external links for search engines

Avoid broken links from partner websites and user bookmarks.

Avoid duplicated web pages.

Redirect issues

• Redirect to a third party website may be an issue. In this case the redirect works as a hidden hyperlink, but it is more difficult to track.
• Client side redirects are not honored by search engines.
• A user can disable a client side redirection in a browser.
• Multi-step redirects. One redirect may point to another, in this case a user request will be redirected several times to reach the target page. A missing chain in this redirect sequence leads to a broken link. The multi-step redirects should be avoided to simplify website management.

How Truwex tracks redirects

Other interesting reading on redirects

Accessites by Mike Cherim

“It’s pretty impressive, so much so that we’ve added to our Resources Page line-up of testing tools… One tab, called “Map” provides a visual of the page with an arrow pointing out the specific culprit. No more counting lines trying to figure out what the heck the tester is talking about — very nice.”

456 Berea street by Roger Johansson

“The major difference is that Truwex checks the generated source, not just the raw HTML source. That means checking all the ugly HTML that gets injected into the page by JavaScript. Like the Google Ads on this site.”

Online PHP Magazine

“Truwex Online 2.0 is an excellent accessibility validation tool …, which aims to create a very complete report on Section 508 and WCAG Accessibility, Privacy, and website Quality… Best of all is the map view, which show you a list of issues found on the sidebar and when you click on every issue it will be highlighted on the website.“

In Spanish by Alma Fernández

In Portuguese by Horácio Pastor Soares

In French

Truwex User Testimonials

“A very impressive and free automated accessibility checking tool. In addition to the usual text display of issues with links to the relevant accessibility standards, it displays the checked page with highlighted areas for each of the reported issues.”
- Kevin Yank, SitePoint.com

“It offers much finer-grained accessibility testing than anything I’ve used up to this point. I was able to find some nagging accessibility issues with my own site and will refer to it with all new development going forward.”
- Trevor Pierce

“I have my favourites for testing my pages, number one on my list is “Truwex Online 2.0 beta, Section 508 and WCAG Accessibility, Privacy, Quality validation Tool”, it has a long name but provides an excellent report and is free. Truwex even displays an image of your page and can show you where your errors are taking place, this is very handy.”
- Adam Piro

“Fascinating. Helped me catch a possible color contrast problem that I wouldn’t have ever thought of.”
- Elaine Nelson

“I like the analysis of how much text can be read by a screen reader within 90 seconds. That’s a very different way of looking at page structure and I’m already considering making changes to a page that I put through Truwex on the basis of this report. Definitely a very useful tool and one I’ll be using in the future.”
- Mel Pedley

“Just when I had my XHTML and CSS validating, and WebXact saying my site was valid Priority 3, I just had to go and test it with this new tool. Geesh, I am humbled again. Now I gotta get back to work! Seriously, looks like a pretty comprehensive tool.”
- David Zemens

“Great tool! I used it to quickly solve some small issues with my own site. It’s also nice that it detects things like the lack of a privacy page. I typically use W3C’s validator to check the code and accessibility, but this goes into even more detail.”
- Ted Goas

“A great tool to check the accessibility of your website. I’m not talking about stuff that you find on usual websites that claim to provide results. This one really goes deep.”
- Romeo Mihalcea

Download Truwex 2.0 trial version.

Web accessibility validation module updated

The Accessibility module was improved: new issues and many manual checks (warnings) were introduced into Truwex to cover all Section 508 and WCAG 1.0 priority 1 and 2 requirements as far as possible.Luminosity contrast formula was updated to comply with the latest WCAG 2.0 guidelines. Many bugs were fixed according to user feedback.

Website redirects tracking

Truwex 2.0 detects all types of redirects on a website. Truwex considers a web page as redirected when it opens one URL, but a browser displays another URL. Truwex detects two types of redirects: server side and client side.

Server side redirect is a correct way to inform website visitors (including search engines) that a web page is moved to another location. The most popular redirect codes are: 301 - Moved permanently and 302 – Moved temporarily.

Client side redirect happens in a user’s browser. It is executed by dynamic functionality like a JavaScript. The client side redirect is not transparent for search engines. It is used often by web sites to forward internet users onto a web page they do not expect, sometimes pointing to spyware or other malware. Client side redirects are not recommended for moving users to different content.

Truwex also reports multi-step redirects, when the target URL is reached through a number of redirects. Redirects information is available in the Inventory section (Websites & Reporting > My Websites & Results, select any task’s report > Inventory) and in issues from the SEO issues group.

Website inventory reports are completely redeveloped

The new Key Pages Report gives an idea, which pages are the most important on a website. It lists all web pages from a website by their depth and by their internal and external incoming links. The number of incoming links is collected from the Yahoo search engine API. The report is available at: Websites & Reporting > My Websites & Results, select any task’s report > Inventory page.

The new Linked Domains Report summarizes all domains used in website’s hyperlinks. This report helps to identify the direction of external links. The report is available at: Websites & Reporting > My Websites & Results, select any task’s report > Inventory.

Other reports:
• Broken and Suspicious Links report lists all broken hyperlinks and ones, which could be broken, found on a website’s pages.
• Website Forms Summary report.
• Cookies Report lists all cookies found on a website. Cookie data include cookie’s domain, path, is cookie persistent or session, is it third- or first-party, cookie name and value.
• Web Beacons Report lists all third party objects found on a website. It helps with verifying web analytics solutions and third party content on a web site.
• Pages with Frames report lists all pages with frames along with frame data such as frame name, title, source URL.

Retrofit workload estimate

Truwex 2.0 features a new report which help web developers evaluate their website improvement workload. The more bugs per page a website has, the more efforts it takes to redevelop. This report shows the number of pages with 0, 1, 2, 3, and more bugs per page on a chart. The report is available as all issues summary for the entire website (select in the Truwex menu: Websites & Reporting > My Websites & Results, select any task’s report > Home), and separately for accessibility, privacy and other issue categories (Websites & Reporting > My Websites & Results, select any task’s report > Issues, then expand “Issue charts” section).

Website compliance for top pages

If you plan to redevelop a website, it is practical to start from the top level pages. Truwex 2.0 shows compliance on 1, 2, and 3 levels deep in your website. This functionality helps to prioritize web developers’ work. If a “Depth 0-3” selected, the issue report is updated to show bugs detected only on web pages with depth up to 3. The depth 3 means a web page can be reached in three clicks from a home page. The charts along with the issues table are updated when the depth level changes (Websites & Reporting > My Websites & Results, select any task’s report > Issues page).

Issues and warnings

Truwex 2.0 classifies all website quality issues as errors or warnings. The errors are considered to be non-compliance problems to be fixed. Warnings just inform about possible problems. Errors and warnings are handled separately in all reports and statistics. A user can change status of every issue according to website’s standards.

Search Engine Optimization

Truwex 2.0 includes a number of validations to improve website visibility in search engines. The most important parameter is web page indexing by a search engine.

SEO validations in Truwex 2.0 include: • Indexed and unindexed pages by Yahoo and MSN • Incoming links by Yahoo • Duplicated pages detection on a website • Server Side and multi-step Redirects tracking • Client side dynamic redirects tracking to internal and external pages. • Meta data validation for duplicated and long HTML titles and descriptions • Robots.txt file analyses • Detection of links to websites which distribute spyware and malware

Improved usability

We try to make Truwex interface easier to use and the reports simpler to understand.
• Now a user can easily select specific accessibility standard to validate: Section 508, or WCAG 1.0 Priority 1 or Priority 1 and 2 issues; or to enable or disable accessibility warnings (manual checks).
• Web page properties were improved and linked to the visual Map report.
• The visualization Map has an option to select all issues of a single type.
• All reports have headers.
• Some reports, as broken links, received additional data to make them more explanatory.

Login to Web Forms

Truwex checks password protected web applications with login pages. It executes JavaScript every visit on defined login page, and then keeps the authentication session during website scan.

Using custom modules Truwex go though complex login processes, like RSA banking authentication.

About Truwex

Truwex 2.0 is a software product, which helps corporate users and web development agencies with creating high quality and compliant websites. Truwex uses an Internet Explorer browser to load and validate web pages. It means a level of accuracy that can’t be achieved with other tools. Truwex Results Visualization increases web developer productivity, a key success factor in large scale website retrofitting projects. Scalable Reporting delivers measurable results to management, website owners, and developers. Truwex validates the following web standards:
• Web Accessibility: US ADA Section 508, W3C WGAG 1.0 and the standards based on it as UK DDA PAS78, Germany BITV
• Web site quality: broken links, JavaScript errors
• Online privacy rules COPPA, PII, privacy policy, cookies, web analytics usage, third party content
• Website Search compliance and visibility in search engines.

Download Truwex 2.0 beta trial version.

Home Page Accessibility Selectors

Truwex validation results presentation was improved to better display a web page compliance with two most common accessibility standards: the US Section 508 of rehabilitation act and W3C WCAG, version 1. A user can select a web accessibility standard to validate: (1) Section 508 or WCAG Priorities 1 and 2. Accessibility checkbox (2) triggers all accessibility checks.. Report warnings checkbox (3) enables warnings for manual inspection. It can be disabled to work only with automatically detected issues.

The validation results page now displays compliance summary on all checks. The first column (1) reports a web page status on automatic checks. The second column (2) shows number of detected issues and warnings for manual inspection.

Truwex validates other accessibility issues (beyond the Section 508 and WCAG priorities 1, 2) and points for manual checks. To manage them expand Accessibility category.

WCAG 2.0 Luminosity Contrast Formula

Truwex automatically validates text/background color contrast and brightness on web pages using WCAG 1.0 formula and WCAG 2.0 luminosity contrast formula. Comparing results of WCAG 1 and 2 formulas, we discovered that Erigami.com website is compliant with the WCAG 1 requirement. However not all color/background combinations fit the WCAG 2 requirement!

However there are color/background combinations, which are compliant with WCAG 2.0 but not compliant with WCAG 1.

Improved Web Page Map

Web page Map displays issues on a web page screenshot. We upgraded Web Page Map functionality to make the tool more user friendly:
• The Issue tab provides links (1) to select eligible issues and warnings on Map.
• New “All” option (2) highlights all issues of the same type on a web page map.
• All Issues and Warnings on the left pane are sorted according to the tool home page order.

New type of validation result: Warnings.

The new Truwex Online Tool includes Warnings, points for manual checks. All validation checks are separated now into Errors and Warnings. It is hard coded in the Online version. However Truwex product version 2.0 will provide a choice (1): every quality check can be assigned Error or Warning status. That helps to prioritize action items.

Thank you for the feedback!

We express our respect to Cecil Ward, who provided very useful feedback for Truwex. We incorporated it into the new Truwex version.

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The Forum is organized by the U.S. Civilian Research & Development Foundation (CRDF). The Forum is co-sponsored by the CRDF, the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) and the Russian Foundation for Assistance for Small Innovative Enterprises (FASIE).

If you are interested in investment or cooperation with Erigami, come to the Northern Virginia at March 27-28, 2007. Contact us to schedule a meeting on the Forum.

A user may choose a set of quality checks in the Truwex online tool. To do this, expand categories on the Truwex online tool, and choose rules to validate a webpage. For example, if a web page does not need a skip link, you may uncheck it.

Erigami approach to website quality and compliance validation

We assume websites may follow custom compliance standards: national legislation, industry standards, corporate guidelines. There are many ways to make a website accessible and compliant. Addressing this technology diversity, Truwex provides a choice of quality rules for validation both in the online and software product versions.

The Truwex software product goes further than the online tool and provides settings to control quality rules. For example, if a webpage uses Google Analytics to track visitors, Truwex may detect an issue “Web beacon with/without cookies is found”.

If this beacon is approved for a website (a website uses it to track customers), it can be excluded from results. Therefore this issue which is visible on the Truwex online tool, will be made not to appear in the Truwex software product version.

Download Truwex trial version and see how it works on your website.

Option B: Provide your feedback

If you believe that Truwex has validated your webpage incorrectly, please provide feedback. You may post on this web page (all posts are moderated) or fill out a feedback form. We highly value you opinion. If your advice is valid and can be incorporated into Truwex, we will make a special mention of your name and publish a link to your website on erigami.com.

The solution:

• Open FireFox installation folder. The default path is “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox”.
• Create an empty file in this folder with the name “msacm32.dll”. Use Notepad.
• Close all FireFox windows and open a web page with Flash sound to test it.
• If you wish to return sound back, just rename the file “msacm32.dll”.

I have tested the failure examples in several browsers and discovered that these examples generally do not lead to problems with user-defined styles: 3 sample codes of the 5 have no problems in all tested browsers, and 2 sample codes have problems only in IE 6.0, therefore it is fair to consider this problem an IE bug.

Testing

Browsers: Internet Explorer 6.0 SP2, Internet Explorer 7.0 beta 3, FireFox 1.5, Opera 9.0.

Workflow: I created 5 pages with html taken from the failure examples’ code, inserted some comment text and uploaded the pages to the web. Then I adjusted the browsers to show text, background, and links not in the colors specified by the page author, but in my own user-defined colors: text color - yellow, background color - grey, unvisited links color - white, visited links color - pink. Then I opened each page in every browser and examined them carefully, paying special attention to the colors. The goal of testing was to make sure that the pages would display the user-defined colors (i.e. the author-defined colors would be totally ignored in spite of the way they were set in HTML).

To set user-defined colors in a browser:

• Internet Explorer. Open menu Tools > Internet Options. In the Internet Options dialog:
  
  • Press Colors button, and in the Colors dialog uncheck the “Use Windows colors” box and set your chosen colors, press Ok to close the dialog.
  • Press Accessibility button and in the Accessibility dialog check the following 3 boxes under the “Formatting” label: Ignore colors specified on Web pages, Ignore font styles specified on Web pages, and Ignore font sizes specified on Web pages. Press Ok to close the dialog.
  • Press Ok.
• FireFox. Open menu Tools > Options.
  
  • Select the “Content” tab and press the Colors button in the Fonts & Colors section. In the Colors dialog: set colors, uncheck the “Use system colors” box, and uncheck the “Allow pages to choose their own colors, instead of my selections above” box. Press Ok.
  • Press Ok.
• Opera. To quickly test pages in this browser, I decided not to look for custom color settings but to use the standard Opera means. On the pane opened by clicking on “Glasses” button, I selected User mode instead of Author mode and set High contrast schema: black background, white text and links.

Pages to test
http://www.erigami.com/test/wcag/styles1.html - HTML code sets background color to white
http://www.erigami.com/test/wcag/styles2.html - HTML code sets background color to white
http://www.erigami.com/test/wcag/styles3.html - HTML code sets text color to white
http://www.erigami.com/test/wcag/styles4.html - HTML code sets text color to white
http://www.erigami.com/test/wcag/styles5.html - HTML code sets hyperlink color to red

Test results
The results of my tests are presented in the following table. For every page and browser the table contains a test result: whether the page was displayed with user-defined colors (marked as “ok”) or HTML defined (marked as “Not ok”). And if not, a description of the discrepancy is provided.

Conclusion: Generally the page colors were those I expected. For example, if I set the browser so that the link color would be white, it was white in spite of any colors set in the page’s source. It was the same with the other colors, so I always had the desired color contrast. I ran into problems only with the first two samples when I was using the IE 6.0 browser. For some reason IE ignored my background and preferred the background set on the page. This is likely a bug, since it has been worked out with IE 7.0. Other browsers have no problems with showing user-defined colors on all test pages.

Written by Irina Kochetova

Truwex is a server application. It can be installed on Windows operation systems. Read Truwex system requirements for details.
Read Truwex installation instructions.

Truwex for SMB is dedicated to organizations with websites up to 2000 web pages.

Download Truwex trial.
Read Truwex installation guides.