WebAIM recently released the WAVE Toolbar for Firefox, which augments their free online accessbility evaluation service, known as WAVE. WAVE is currently in version 4, much like Cynthia Says but with a focus on developer friendliness by overlaying results visually above the page you are testing. I think WAVE is a pretty cool idea. The fact of the matter that no automated tool can ever tell whether a website is truly accessible means it always boils down to human assessment in the end. So a visual tool is much welcomed as the explanations you get from Cynthia are quite cryptic at times.

For more power in your toolbar I recommend trying out the Firefox Accessibility Extension. This one is primarily an assistive tool for people with disabilities browsing the Web but also doubles up as a great accessibility evaluation tool for developers.

What is CSS diagnostics? It's a method of applying styles to elements in your markup to catch standards compliance issues. A way of ensuring you don't leave any serious accessibility holes and a visual deterrent for web authors editing pages with diagnostics switched on.

Here are some resources I found useful in understanding the practicality of this pioneering concept:

• Diagnostic styling
• CSS Tools: Diagnostic CSS
• Helping your client maintain markup quality
• Find depreciated elements using CSS

The only problem with CSS diagnostics is that it relies on the CSS capabilities of a browser to find issues. So if your browser is less capable, meaning it doesn't understand the diagnostic styles, then it negates the idea totally. Mind you, we're at a point in CSS support whereby this is becoming less and less a problem but it is still a potential one.

Luckily CSS diagnostics isn't the be all and end all of diagnostics. We have the king of diagnostics — Firebug, Web Inspector for Safari and more recently the much improved IE8 Developer Toolbar. And if you're looking for a cross-browser solution there's always the brilliant XRAY. Oh, how spoilt we all are!

I'm sure this is probably very old school news but I've only recently come across this free Favicon generator tool by DynamicDrive. It allows you to convert any image in either Gif, Jpeg and PNG formats, with transparency if required, into a proper icon.http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon

There are two more I haven't tried yet but look good too:

http://www.dagondesign.com/tools/favicon-generator-tool
http://www.graphicsguru.com/favicon.php

Now there is no more excuse not to create a Favicon for your site!

Favicon away my friends!