Bobby Polices Internet Sites for Accessibility
By Jim Rapoza
PC Week, May 11, 1998, page 27

The Center for Applied Special Technology has developed a tool that lets
companies determine how accessible their HTML pages are to individuals with
physical disabilities, but the tool's assessments are not complete. 

CAST developed Bobby (as in London’s "bobbies") 2.0, currently in beta
testing, to determine whether Web pages meet the guidelines of the Web
Accessibility Initiative. 

The 24 required guidelines include elements such as providing text
descriptions for images in a page; the 30 recommended accessibility
guidelines include making applets keyboard-operable. A Web site that passes
all the accessibility tests is approved to use the Bobby icon. 

PC Week Labs evaluated Bobby on individual Web pages and on entire sites. The
program scans pages and provides a useful report listing WAI violations, but
in tests it could only scan for compliance with less than half of the
guidelines. We recommend that sites concerned about accessibility issues also
download the working draft from the W3C Web site at http://www.w3c.org. The
WAI’s guidelines document is easy to comprehend and provides more complete
information. 

The beta of Bobby, also available as a Web-based service, can be downloaded
from http://www.cast.org.