Re: User agent support of SUMMARY attribute in tables

I think you are taking the wrong approach, and in the long run one that 
might be harmful. You can defend yourself against all but the most 
stupid regulations by making the same argument you make to your boss - 
that the tool is wrong and you are right. If you can find a handful of 
experts to back you up (and in many cases this is a good forum to find 
a handful of internationally acknowledged experts who will happily 
publish a statement like that for a particular case), you shouldn't 
have any worries.

It is, of course a slippery slope between "most experts agree that tool 
Z produces an unreliable result for test Y" and "a couple of my friends 
and I don't like meeting checkpoint X so claim it is irrelevant". 
Keeping yourself from sliding down there is what makes you an 
accessibility professional, and therefore worth more than the software 
you are using.

(For the record I am happy to state that a report saying a site failed 
Bobby is not necessarily a reliable indicator of whether it meets the 
requirements of WCAG - most of the reports I have seen which use Bobby 
or similar tools for testing have fairly poor methodology, and very few 
of them are, in my opinion, good enough to be trusted over general 
opinions on specific topics that I see on this list...)

cheers

Chaals

On Thursday, Jan 23, 2003, at 11:13 Australia/Melbourne, iris wrote:

> i wish it was that easy and normally i would only care
> about making a website truly accessible no matter what
> the automated checkers say.
>
> but then my boss, who hired me as an accessibility
> expert, says, why doesn't our site pass the bobby
> test?  i might spend a few minutes trying to explain
> my decisions to him and might even succeed.  but how
> do i defend myself against a publicly available report
> on the accessibility of higher education project
> websites where one of my sites is listed as failing
> bobby.
>
> i have applied numerous (what i consider) hacks to
> please bobby just so that my sites *look* accessible
> to outsiders.
>
--
Charles McCathieNevile           charles@sidar.org
Fundación SIDAR                       http://www.sidar.org

Received on Wednesday, 22 January 2003 19:26:17 UTC