Re: bobby 3.2

Like I said, overally, lots cleaner and easier to use.

But here's some suggestions and a few bugs I found.

DESIGN SUGGESTIONS

- I'd suggest making "advanced options" link on home page look like a 
button in the form rather then a menu item at the side.  Idea is that 
people just look at the form and go without reading anything else, so you 
want to put it in their face.

- Would be handy to have a "clear form" button.

- On the advanced options form some of the option selections are labeled 
"BA".  Need to define what that means.

- The first sentence of advanced options says "Bobby's Advanced Options 
allow you to select more than one browser for compatibility tests"

This stresses that there's "more than one" broswer.  But this may be first 
mention of browser tests the user noticed... since on the home page you 
have to scroll down and read a bunch till you get to it (cf. "in your face" 
comment above)..  I'd suggest rewording to e.g.

"Bobby's Advanced Options allow you to test the compatibility of your page 
with one or more browsers"

- It's a good feature that Bobby can impersonate other browsers, but there 
should be a warning that this isn't perfect... since some web pages sniff 
out browser capabilities via javascript and bobby doesn't do javascript.

- on advanced options page would be handy to link parts of form to their 
explanation below.

APPARENT SOFTWARE BUGS

The rest are all software glitches I thank rather than a problem in the design.

1. It looks like when you click on one of the question marks it's supposed 
to jump to the corresponding warning, right?  However, there seems to be a 
bug:  e.g. for the url att.com, the first question mark has the address

http://att.com/#UserChecks3

I think it's supposed to jump to the output page, viz to

http://bobby.cast.org/bobby?URL=http%3A%2F%2Fatt.com#UserChecks3


2. Tried it on pacareerlink.state.pa.us.

This is one of those pages which is basically just a hunk of 
javascript.    bobby catches it with the user check

"Provide alternative content for each SCRIPT that conveys important 
information or functionality. "

One cosmetic thing though.

The bobby output showed the following at the top:

function jumpOn() { form = document.frmJump; //alert("Micah Mood is working 
on the browser detect (9/17/99 3:50 pm)\nbrowser name = " + cBrowserName + 
"\nversion = " + iBrowserVersion); form.submit(); }

This comes from javascript in the head of the page which the web page 
authors failed to wrap in an HTML comment to hide from non javascript 
browsers, i.e they failed to wrap in the usual

<!--
script goes here
// -->

Bobby should omit script contents from the text.

3. Back at att.com the first line reads

User checks are triggered by something specific on the page; however, you 
need to determine whether they apply. Bobby Approval requires that none of 
them apply to your page. Please review these 6 item(s):

Did you mean "are not triggered"?

Also, the first three items have no line numbers and the rest do have line 
numbers.  So some are specific and some aren't.  Looks like a software glitch.

----------------------

Len

--
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Institute on Disabilities/UAP and Dept. of Electrical Engineering at Temple 
University
(215) 204-2247 (voice)                 (800) 750-7428 (TTY)
http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday         mailto:kasday@acm.org

The WAVE web page accessibility evaluation assistant: 
http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/