3 tips: free Bobby, free Waizilla, and use Acrobot
Added on Tuesday 9 Dec 2003
I am sorry that I was unable to provide my usual accessible web design tips over the last couple of weeks; I got caught up in a number of projects that kept me very busy. To try to make up for my tardiness, this week I am offering 'three tips for the price of one'.
Tip 1.
Although Bobby, the web accessibility evaluator, is now a commercial product (and the website version only lets you evaluate a page once a minute), did you know that you can still download a free version of the Bobby evaluator? I recently found a link to the original download on the WATS.ca website, along with a host of other useful accessibility testing tools.
Download the free Bobby accessibility tester (requires the Java Runtime Engine which is included in the download).
Tip 2.
While I am on the subject of web accessibility checkers, you may, or may not, be aware that a free cross-platform website accessibility testing tool called WaiZilla, is currently being developed by Tim Roberts, and a group of other programmers . This is an Open Source project, so not only can you can keep up with developments by regularly visiting the website, if you are interested and have the appropriate talents, you can also contribute to the development process.
Tip 3.
If you find that marking up all your acronyms has become a bit of a chore, you may be interested in a tool developed by Ian Lloyd on the Accessify website; the Acrobot - Abbreviation and Acronym Generator. This useful tool will find acronyms in your HTML, add the <acronym> tag, and the appropriate title attribute. There is also a 'favelet' provided on the site to make it even easier to pass text through to Acrobot.
The tips archive is at: http://www.mcu.org.uk/weeklytips/