Re: Bobby - a bad tool

The one thing about Bobby and other accessibility checkers I feel is 
misleading is that they categorize manual checks as a "problem". A 
site may be accessible, but will generate a long list of items to 
manually check anyway.

I personally prefer Cynthia Says (http://cynthia.contentquality.com/) 
because it clearly says which checkpoints are not relevant to your 
site. The LIFT plugin 
(http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/accessibility/lift.html) can 
help, but I would recommend customizing it so that the manual check 
report is disabled. Another interesting test site is WebAIM's WAVE 
(http://www.wave.webaim.org/index.jsp) which is structured so that it 
shows
location of ALT tags and other tags on the page. Finally, some 
editors like Dreamweaver have decent built-in accessibility checkers 
and reports - see 
http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/accessibility/dreamweaver.html for 
details

I also recommend a multi-pronged testing strategy of a color check, 
style sheet check, zoom check and a text browser check. Expecting an 
automated tool to pick up every nuanced issue, like color contrast, 
is not realistic right now,

Elizabeth

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D.
Instructional Designer
Education Technology Services, TLT/ITS
Penn State University
ejp10@psu.edu, (814) 865-0805 or (814) 865-2030 (Main Office)

210 Rider Building II
227 W. Beaver Avenue
State College, PA   16801-4819
http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/psu
http://tlt.psu.edu

Received on Wednesday, 27 October 2004 21:00:13 UTC