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Does anyone know of a good tool to evaluate a site's compliance with Section 508, other than Bobby? Having used the online page-a-minute free version of Bobby for a little while, I persuaded my boss to drop the $300 for the full version.
It does a nice job, but has one huge flaw that is making me crazy enough to try to find an alternative: Once you get the results of your session, whether it's a site with one page or a thousand pages, you have this very nice report. But the folks at Watchfire have intentionally (according to their tech support) engineered out of the product any convenient way to share those results with anyone who does not also have the $300 full version. (The same tech rep also told me that was the motivation behind it; apparently a marketing genius sold someone in management on the idea.) I work for a large entity and part of my job is evaluating different sites for 508 compliance - that was the whole point of having someone to do this, so other people wouldn't have to buy/learn/use new software.
Bobby has no Print function, no Save As, and no Export. All you can do is open the reports from within Bobby, in their native proprietary format, page by laborious page, then manually highlight/copy each page's content and paste it into a Word document. If you want the results to look professional, you then have to tweak and configure the results cosmetically in Word. For a big site, this takes hours or days.
Oh, and no documentation comes with your purchase, and the Help file is awkward to use, and once you've used up your initial tech support, it's $50/call, according to the tech rep. I'm over it.
So...does anyone know of an alternative 508 evaluation tool that is reliable and more user-friendly? Thanks.
It may have a mode useful to you. (I tend to find the reports clearer than Bobby's)
And welcome to non-lurk mode at WMW!
A-Prompt is a free download for Windows 98/98SE/2000/Me/XP from the University of Toronto.
No need to go online to test and aids in repair!
Best thing I've found yet.
Dreamweaver also has an extension that allows you to test for 508 and WAI. I think its called the Accessibility Suite and is available from the Macromedia site.
It sounds like its only limitation that might affect me is that the largest site it can evaluate is 100 pages. That should catch 99.9% of what I have to deal with - the alternative product they sell, that would handle sites larger than 100 pages, is $495, which is too rich for our blood these days anyway.
I do have one particular site I've had a hard time using Bobby to evaluate. That might be a good way to try out Cynthia. ;)
HiSoftware [hisoftware.com] is another resource for accessibility tools.
All you can do is open the reports from within Bobby, in their native proprietary format
<wince>From a company promoting the merits of accessibility!</wince>
Ronin, ain't that the truth! In fact, I wish I'd thought of that when I was on the phone with them about it; as it was, I was not abusive although I made it clear I felt I'd been had, since it never occurred to me to ask before purchasing whether I could print or save the product's output, and the word "cheesy" may have been used.
In my opinion, the decision to prohibit report sharing was a collosal blunder by Watchfire, based on cockiness and overconfidence in their current position as industry leader. Their good name and good marketing has brought them this far, but they may have munged it up with this move.
In my opinion, the decision to prohibit report sharing was a collosal blunder by Watchfire, based on cockiness and overconfidence in their current position as industry leader.
I'm not sure. If anything prohibiting report sharing displays a lack of confidence in their position as industry leader.
But the measure is entirely misplaced. It smacks of the RIAA's philosophy where they don't want free MP3 downloads to be generally available because they believe it will 'hurt' CD sales.
When are these executives going to realise that while there may be some get-the-freebie diehards (who, anyway, will never change their stance) the benefit of having a distributed network of people promoting your name and product (in this case copies of the Bobby report) is a promotional strategy, which has a worth far exceeding the cost of giving the freebies away in the first place?!
Adobe realised this years ago, when they made Acrobat a free download instead of charging, in order to make PDFs ubiquitous! It seems, even now, some people still don't get it.
I wonder if there are any Watchfire representatives who would like to comment? >;->
Your perspective that this move implies a lack of confidence is interesting! And you make a really good point when you compare it against Adobe's decision to give away the Reader. If they want people to be impressed with what their product can do, why make it difficult for them to see it?
