review of RetroAccess evaluation tool from Diamond Bullet

Hello,

Checked out RetroAccess today.  Anyone else played with this?
http://www.retroaccess.com/access_enable.cgi

Here are some thoughts based on a quick check. I used the demo version to evaluate cnn.com.

Positives:
1. Summaries are helpful. You can drill down as much as you like.
2.  Saves info about human checks. (would be cool if they were using EARL!).  One thing I like is that if it finds the same image multiple times, it will propagate the user's action to all of those images.

Negatives:
1. There seems to be quite a few things it doesn't check for and it doesn't seem to give the user explicit enough directions for them to determine if they pass or not.
2. It would be cool if it drew the parallels to WCAG 1.0 and also perform checks or offer tips for the P1 checkpoints in WCAG 1.0 that are not covered by 508.
3. The cnn page uses lots of tables for layout.  The tips associated with all of the tables the tool identified says, 
<quote>Possible data table without headers 
Header rows and columns allow interpretive programs to read the data in the table appropriately. Use the "th" tag to identify the meanings of each row and column
</quote>
Since they are layout tables, th is not needed. This summary makes it sound like th is required on all tables.

Just a few quick thoughts,
--wendy

-- 
wendy a chisholm
world wide web consortium 
web accessibility initiative
seattle, wa usa
/--

Received on Monday, 14 January 2002 13:00:47 UTC