About HERA

Introduction

Fundación Sidar offers this tool free of charge to developers, designers and the public in general, to simplify the manual revision of webpages' and websites' accesibility.

HERA is designed and developed by Carlos Benavídez for Fundación Sidar, with contribution from Emmanuelle Gutiérrez y Restrepo and Charles McCathieNevile.

English translation thanks to:

Portuguese translation thanks to:

French translation thanks to:

Catherine Roy
Vincent Tabard
Charles McCathieNevile

Where does HERA name come from? At the beginning of 2003, Sidar Fundation launched Edipo, a tool for personal stylesheet creation and, already in that moment, we thought about a "sister" utility based in stylesheet application to simplify the review of accessibility. As Edipo is a mythological character, we looked for a similar name for this new aplication and we decided for HERA, which besides being the name of another femenine character, conforms the acronym for: "Hojas de Estilo para la Revisión de la Accesibilidad." (Accesibility Revision StyleSheets)

Objetive and functionality

HERA´s objective is to simplify the work of those who wish or have the mission of reviewing the accesibility of a page or a web site. A review can never be complete without a manual review. Automatic review tools can only detect determined elements and attributes bat cannot ensure they´re properly used. Therefore, it´s indispensable a human´s participation in order to check the elements and attributes that cannot be automaticaly validated and if Accessibility Guidelines are being properly applied.

HERA simplifies finding errors in a page, applying a stylesheet specially created for that purpouse, and explains what to look for to test a each checkpoint.

In HERA´s help, you´ll find detailed information about how it works.

Help us

As all Sidar Fundation projects, HERA is an open source application, and anyone is welcome to collaborate.

To collaborate with HERA development, you just have to get in contact with Developers Team by sending a message to: hera@sidar.org.

We encourage those who use HERA to declare in their pages, personal or profesional, having used it. This way it will diffuse faster, and help the information society to improve its quality and accessibility.

Declare the use of HERA

To declare HERA has been applied in the validation of a page or web site, you just have to put this code wherever you wish:

This icon will be shown:

Offer HERA from your web site

To offer your visitors and users from any website the chance of using HERA directly from it, you just have to put this HTML code wherever you consider proper:

<form action="http://www.sidar.org/ex_hera/hera.php" method="post">
<fieldset title="Validate page with HERA.">

<legend>
Validate your page with<a title="HERA home page." href="http://www.sidar.org/ex_hera/">
<img src="http://www.sidar.org/ex_hera/img/genhera.gif" alt="HERA." /> HERA</a>.
</legend>

<p>
<label title="Name of reviewer." for="autor">Name of Reviewer(optional) 
<input type="text" name="autor" id="autor" value="Your name" size="35" /></label>
</p>

<p>
<label for="url3" title="Write the URL of the page you wish to validate with HERA.">
URL: <input type="text" name="url" id="url3" value="http://" size="25" /></label>
</p>

<p><strong>Sort checkpoints by</strong>:</p>

<p>
<label for="numer"><input type="radio" name="ord" value="Numbering" 
id="numer" title="Numerical order." checked="checked" /> Numbering</label> |
<label for="elem"><input type="radio" name="ord" value="Elements" 
id="elem" title="Grouped by element types." /> Elements</label> |
<label for="niv1"><input type="radio" name="ord" value="P1" 
id="niv1" title="Priority 1." /> Priority 1</label> |
<label for="niv2"><input type="radio" name="ord" value="P2" 
id="niv2" title="Priority 2." /> Priority 2</label> |
<label for="niv3"><input type="radio" name="ord" value="P3" 
id="niv3" title="Priority 3." /> Priority 3</label>
</p>

<p>
<input type="hidden" name="idioma" value="en" />
<input type="image" name="btns" value="Startr" 
src="http://www.sidar.org/ex_hera/img/revihera.gif" alt="Validate with HERA" />
</p>

</fieldset>
</form>

This will appear in your page:

Offer HERA-XP from your Web site

You can also offer visitors the opportunity to test a page with HERA-XP, the simplified version of HERA. Just put the following code where you think it is appropriate:

The following will then appear in your page: