An Introduction To Accessible Web Design

Bobby

While it is possible to read the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and build your site to comply, wouldn't it be easier if there were a tool to test it for you? You've guessed it, there is: a product called Bobby was produced by a non-profit organisation called CAST in order to test sites to ensure they complied with the guidelines. It is also aware of the conformance levels, and will tell you which level your site is at (if any).

In December 2001 Bobby also began supporting Section 508, which makes it the most complete accessibility tester available. In July 2002 Bobby was purchased by a company called Watchfire, who now look after the product.

Bobby has its own set of logos that work in much the same way as do the W3C logos:

- Level 'A'

- Level 'Double-A'

- Level 'Triple-A'

- For Section 508 compliance approved by Bobby

You can use Bobby in two ways. If you only want to test a few pages here and there it is available as a free on-line tool at http://bobby.watchfire.com/ and works in much the same way as the W3C HTML validator (if you've used it). You enter the URL of the document you want to check and receive a report that details where you comply and where you don't. Because of the nature of the accessibility guidelines, it's not possible to check everything through a program, so you will still have to check some things yourself -- Bobby tells you what to check.

If you want to check many pages, the on-line tool has its limitations (you can only do a small number of checks per hour). In this case, you'd probably be best to purchase the downloadable version, so you can check as many pages as you like. At the time of this writing (November 2002) the price is just US$99.

A nice feature of Bobby is that for every guideline, advice is readily available on how to make your document comply, and why it's important for accessibility.

Over to You

For more information, these urls will give you a good start. Have fun making your sites accessible!

Further Information

• Policies Relating to Web Accessibility
• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
• Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
• User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
• W3C WCAG Conformance Logos
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG)
• The WCAG Guidelines
• A checklist of the WCAG checkpoints
• Techniques for following the WCAG guidelines
• Section 508
• CAST
• Watchfire
• Bobby