Testing Your Site for 508 Compliance
The Bobby Validator
Bobby is an accessibility validator
is a free service that will allow you to test web pages and help expose and
repair barriers to accessibility and encourage compliance with existing accessibility
guidelines, such as Section 508 and the W3C's WCAG. Bobby can be a great
first step to understanding accessibility guidelines.
How to Use the Bobby Validator
- Go to Bobby's home page.
- Select the U.S. Section 508 Guidelines as your validation standard.
- Enter a web page address in the URL box and click "Submit.”
- When the evaluation is done click on the "Skip to Report"'
link to jump to the bottom of the page to review any issues found by Bobby. Be
sure to read through the Section 508 User Checks. The User Check
issues can only be verified manually.
Once you have resolved all Section 508 Accessibility issues (including Section
508 User Checks), you may display the Bobby 508 Approved icon on your site:
Visit the icon guideline
page to learn more about displaying Bobby Approved icons.
A-Prompt Web Accessibility Verifier
(http://aprompt.snow.utoronto.ca/.)
A-Prompt offers a step-by-step guide to identifying and repairing accessibility
issues. It even provides automatic repair for most common issues.
Like Bobby, A-Prompt is a free service. However, unlike Bobby, which can
be used online, A-Prompt must be downloaded and installed on your machine.
Yet, A-Prompt offers many more automated features that guide you through
retrofitting your site. In its current format as a standalone for PC platform,
the A-Prompt allows the author to select a file or for validation and repair,
or select an single HTML element within a file.
The tool may be customized to check for different conformance levels, based
on the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
1.0.
If an accessibility problem is detected, A-Prompt displays the necessary
dialogs and guides the user to fix the problem. Many repetitive tasks are
automated, such as the addition of ALT-text or the replacement of server-side
image maps with client-side image maps.
When all potential problems have been resolved, the repaired HTML code is
inserted into the document and a new version of the file may be saved to
the author's hard drive. After a web page has been checked and repaired by
A-Prompt it will be given a WAI Conformance ranking.
WAC Web Site Evaluation
The OSU Web Accessibility Center (WAC) analyzes web pages for accessibility
to people with disabilities. The WAC offers this as a free service to OSU
faculty and staff to expand the use of technology by people disabilities
The WAC's goal is to ensure that all distance education and online courses
at OSU are fully accessible to persons with disabilities.
To have your web site analyzed, e-mail its URL (address) to webaccess@osu.edu.
We will report any accessibility and/or browser compatibility errors found
on the page. Once your site receives WAC approval, you are entitled to display
a WAC approved icon on your site:
Other Validator’s
Also try the W3C's HTML validator.
A more complete list of evaluation software with links is available on the
W3C site: "Evaluation,
Repair, and Transformation Tools for Web Content Accessibility.”
