RE: Alternative validation tools.

I would like to add to Chuck's comments. I was using Bobby in a web
accessibility course and encountered the failure of Bobby to respond. I
assumed it was the new Watchfire ownership that had imposed the annoying
limitation and was very annoyed. But I later found from out Mike Cooper
that Bobby at CAST had had the same limitation for the reasons Chuck
Mentioned: hackers abusing the free online Bobby rather than paying $99.

I wrote an evaluation of six evaluation and repair tools. Because of the
reaction of one of the tool vendors, the one who advertises most often
on this list, that evaluation will not be offered by the organization
that funded the study and that organization required that I remove the
study from my site. So sorry; I can't offer the study as a resource in
this area.

Yeliz Yesilada recommended the list of repair tools at:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/existingtools.html#Repair which is as good a
reference as there is. There is still some information about evaluation
and repair on my site, http://jimthatcher.com/erx.htm.  

Jim
http://jimthatcher.com 


-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Chuck Hitchcock
Sent: Thursday, December 19, 2002 9:26 AM
To: 'Tim Roberts'; 'WAI list'
Subject: RE: Alternative validation tools.


I'd like to mention that the free page test limits are due primarily to
the abuse of developers who wrote scripts to run against the Bobby
server attempting to replicate the functionality of the $99.00 Bobby
client.  

Those scripts were taking the CAST server down so often that there were
periods when Bobby was not available at all.  I understand that
Watchfire had the same experience and found it necessary to impose
similar limits.

Note that CAST has been very pleased that Watchfire has been willing
continue offering a free version of Bobby along with the $99 client
version.  They have already integrated Bobby into their desktop Web QA
product and their high end enterprise Web MX used by large corporations
where it is likely to have a significant impact on Web accessibility.
Fortunately, many of the testing and reporting improvements have also
been implemented in the $99 client as well.

I am completely sold on the idea of using one test suite for Web content
analysis that includes accessibility among other things such as link
integrity, syntax, privacy, and more.   

Chuck
Chief Education Technology Officer
CAST 

-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Tim Roberts
Sent: Thursday, December 19, 2002 9:13 AM
To: WAI list
Subject: Alternative validation tools.



Seeing as Bobby (under the control of Watchfire) is impeding the
efficiency of developers by limiting requests to one a minute, does
anyone have any suggestions for worthwhile validation tools?

Tim
-- 
Tim Roberts <tim@wiseguysonly.com>
WiseGuysOnly

Received on Thursday, 19 December 2002 16:32:44 UTC