Software in Use: Bobby

In a new regular feature, we report on software used on the Exploit Interactive web site. We begin by reporting on how we make use of the Bobby accessibility checker.

What Is Bobby?

Bobby is a freely-available automated accessibility checking software.

Information providers on the web who have an interest in ensuring that their web pages are accessible will probably be familiar with the web interface to Bobby [1]. This interface provides a web form which can be used to report on the accessibility of web pages by entering the URL into the form.

The standalone Bobby application is probably not as well-known. This is a standalone Java application which can be used to report on the accessibility of web sites, and not just individual pages.

Use of Bobby

Bobby was used to analyse the Exploit Interactive web site. An example of the interface is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: The Bobby Interface

The analysis detected a small number of priority 1 errors (missing ALT tags from IMG elements. These errors were fixed and we can now report that the Exploit Interactive web site contains no Priority 1 accessibility errors.

Discussion of Results

Although Bobby reports no Priority 1 errors on the Exploit Interactive web site Bobby recommends a number of manual checks that could be carried out.

The Exploit Interactive web site tries to ensure that the resources on the web site are accessible to all. We cannot guarantee that this will be the case - because (a) we are dependent on resources created by others; (b) the conversion tools we use are not perfect and (c) we have to ensure that issues are made available by the publication date.

We are aware that the accessibility guidelines recommend use of cascading style sheets and deprecate use of tables for formatting web pages. Although these guidelines are sensible in many respects, sadly many of the widely deployed browsers fail to provide adequate support for style sheets.

Figure 2 illustrates this problem.

Figure 2: Netscape's Poor Support for CSS

In Figure 2 an image floats over part of the text, making the text impossible to read.

As well as problems with the screen display, use of CSS can cause problems when printing a page from the Netscape browser. One of our readers reported that:

When I tried to print your article on NFP analysis ([2] - Editor), Netscape 4.06 on Win95, expanded all of the table sections so that the article ended up with over 85 pages. Is there anything obviously wrong with the HTML coding? ;^)

The answer to this question is that, no, there is nothing wrong with the HTML markup - the problem is with the Netscape browser.

In order to address these two problems we have made the following decisions:

• Images will be enclosed in tables in order to stop them "floating" across the text in Netscape.
• User-agent negotiation will be implemented in order to send "safe" CSS files to Netscape.

Conclusions

The Bobby Java application proved to be a very useful tool for helping to track down accessibility problems on the Exploit Interactive web site. For anyone who has responsibility for maintaining a web site, as opposed to a small number of web pages, Bobby is a useful tool in tracking down accessibility problems. Highly recommended!

Summary: Bobby is available as a free downloadable application from the CAST web site. It allows you to check multiple local files or entire web sites at one time. The application runs the same page checking code as the online version. Once your site receives a Bobby Approved rating, you are entitled to display a Bobby Approved icon on your site:

.

References

1. Bobby, CAST,
   <URL:http://www.cast.org/bobby/>
2. Analysis of NFP Web Sites, Exploit Interactive, issue 3,
   <URL:http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue3/nfp-websites/>

For citation purposes:
"Software in Use: Bobby", Exploit Interactive, issue 4, January 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue4/software-used/>

[HTML Validation] - [Accessibility check]