The Herdict Firefox add-on for website accessibility
When Arun and I were traveling through India, we regularly heard from participants at the conferences we attended that many websites in India just don’t work in Firefox. Website compatibility has been an issue Arun has worked on since his first days at Netscape working on website evangelism. Nearly every time we spoke to a new audience, this issue resurfaced.
Coincidentally, today at Mozilla, Jonathan Zittrain spoke to a group at Mozilla and the discussion hit on Herdict (that link is a video demo), which is his project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
“Herdict is a portmanteau of ‘herd’ and ‘verdict’ and seeks to show the verdict of the users (the herd). Herdict Web seeks to gain insight into what users around the world are experiencing in terms of web accessibility; or in other words, determine the herdict.”
You can install the Firefox add-on here. From his site:
“The add-on will install an icon of a sheep in the toolbar of your web browser. As you browse, you can click the sheep icon and select “Report This Site” to report your experience to us.”
For those we met on our trip, if you happen to be following this blog, give this plugin a try and let us know what you think. I’d be interested to hear how we might use something like Herdict for a larger effort to evangelize website compatibility in a place like India.
it’ll really be a good tool to eliminate this problem(IE monopoly)..and we can report those websites easily too.
As I understand, this website is useful for finding if a given website is blocked by some country or ISP, and somewhat replace a website monitoring services with a social distributed peer review. I don’t think that it can be used to check for websites compatibilities across browsers, as it checks only if website is up and not ask the user to actually use the website for some moments and see if something is broken on his browser.
By the way, I afraid tools such as this one are dangerous as it can be used for click jacking attacks if someone will insert into the websites list some infected websites. This might be a treat much like how twitter got infected by the ‘liveface’ social virus.
Kartik: Thanks for the remarks.
Tomer: We should get Zittrain to respond to your concerns. Frankly, I don’t have an answer for you.
yea its a really nice tool to report the sites showing evangelism bug directly to mozilla..as a matter of fact my university’s intranet website works only on IE..:(