Meet Bobby©, a HTML analyzer

A visit to Bobby© is essential for web page designers and illustrators who want to police their work for accessibility to people with disabilities. Bobby© (as in British police officer) is the latest development from the universal design lab at the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST).

Bobby© was designed to detect a wide variety of accessibility problems commonly found on web pages. After entering in the URL of the page you want him to analyze, Bobby© will redisplay an annotated version of the original page. At every place where there is a disability access problem, he will place a small disability access violation symbol followed by a letter and a number (like E1 for Error 1). If the access problem does not affect those with disabilities, but is a browser compatibility problem, then Bobby© will place a miniature Bobby© icon on the annotated page. Clicking on either access violation symbol will display a description of the error. Bobby© places all these descriptions at the end of the annotated document and you can see them all at once by dragging your browser's vertical slider bar to the bottom of the annotated web page. If the error message seems confusing, just click on it (it's a hypertext link) and a more detailed description will be displayed with possible solutions to the problem.

Bobby's error messages are divide into three main categories: errors, warnings, and suggestions. An error is a problem that would cause a page to be inaccessible to many people and is often something that is important to fix. A warning usually means an access problem that should be fixed, but doing so could substantially limit the designer's choices (i.e., not using HTML Tables). And finally, a suggestion is Bobby's way of telling you that there might be something you want to consider adding or changing on your web page, but it's not imperative.

For more information call (508) 531-8555 (V), (508) 531-3310 or online http://www.cast.org.