Don't rely on automated tools for checking accessibility - part 2.
Added on Tuesday 20 Apr 2004
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p>Thanks to Maurice Franceschi of Civic Computing for his reply to last weeks tip about the dangers of relying on automated tools to check accessibility:
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"Just to follow on from the over-reliance on Automated Tools, a point I fully endorse, by making one further observation on the use of automated tools, in this case Bobby.
One great problem we are having with Bobby is that I have found that - like any software - it does have small bugs in it. To Watchfire's credit, I was able to get past the no-can-do support chap and get to a more senior manager who did investigate my issues in detail and got the bugs fixed quickly.
However, there are two outstanding problems with Bobby that all web developers need to watch for.
1. Bobby sometimes think a telephone or fax number, or house number, is a 'fixed font size' setting and will return an error on your page. Trivial but it goes to show the fallibility of any software product - even one so universal in use.
2. Bobby consistently returns an error in regard to the naming of anchors, labels, id's. That is, if you have an anchor such as 'Content' or 'FAQ 1' a Form Label attribute (name, id) such as 'Search' or 'Name' Bobby will flag this as an error as it has some sort of internal vocabulary of 'unacceptable hypertext' or 'text requiring context'.
This is both very subjective and at times completely inappropriate when it starts to pick up HTML elements that cannot be heard or seen by the site visitor anyway.
If Bobby issued Warnings rather than Errors that would be fine, but as it is it makes the business of creating AA and AAA compliant sites that bit more cumbersome. In fact, I have now been involved in auditing several websites that are AAA compliant in every respect but which Bobby continue to fail on this bogus AA issue. We've tried to change the code and text but nothing seems to work.
I've been on the Watchfire site and I can see much discussion on this issue so it is a real problem out there for many web designers that Watchfire have failed to address.
At the end of the day, I do not care too much as I know the websites are accessible and if I can't put on a Bobby logo it is not an issue for me. There are plenty of instances where the opposite is the case anyway."
Thanks for getting in touch Maurice, this is very useful information for developers to know - particularly when clients insist on displaying a Bobby logo to 'prove' their site is accessible.