In order to help other developers understand accessibility and assistive technology, I’ve been working on a series of articles aimed at developers. As a slight change of pace, I invite you to experience Twitter through the “eyes” of a screen reader in this short video. You’ll hear what it sounds like when a screen reader reads the text of a page, and you’ll experience what a blind user might experience if he or she encounters a browser popup dialog. You’ll also get a chance to experience what happens when the browser experiences the “spinning beachball” on Mac OSX.
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There’s a toolbar for Internet Explorer that has many of the same features as Firebug for Firefox.
Visit http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e59c3964-672d-4511-bb3e-2d5e1db91038&displaylang=en to get a copy of the current beta.

To launch it, start IE7 and go to Tools -> Toolbars -> Explorer Bar -> IE DOM explorer.

You can inspect the DOM, the HTML elements, the CSS, and much more. It’s great to have this available!

What do you do when you are confronted with the possibility that everything you know is wrong, or that you’re doing things not because they’re good, but because everyone else is doing it?

It seems that there are issues with using XHTML instead of HTML, and I think this is something that any web developer needs to investigate further.

From the article:

If you’re a web developer, you’ve probably heard about XHTML, the markup language developed in 1999 to implement HTML as an XML format. Most people who use and promote XHTML do so because they think it’s the newest and hottest thing, and they may have heard of some (usually false) benefits here and there. But there is a lot more to it than you may realize, and if you’re using it on your website, even if it validates, you are probably using it incorrectly.

This website uses XHTML 1.0 Transitional, apparently incorrectly.

All links open in a new window.

• Beware of XHTML

Other links:

• HTML or XHTML? Fact From Fiction
• Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful
• Rebuttal to “Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful
• Serving XHTML with the Right MIME Type