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From: Mark Magennis
Date: Jul 13, 2001 9:23PM

Good point Jeff. "Bobby Approval" means WAI priority 1 only and relies so
much on manual assessment that it is virtually worthless as a reliable
indicator of accessibility. Bobby's value lies more in helping you to assess
a website for accessibility. I think that the "Bobby Approved" symbol does,
however, have value for spreading awareness of accessibility as an issue
that can be tackled.
The major limiting factor of Bobby is that, of the sixteen priority 1
checkpoints, only one can actually be tested automatically by a tool like
Bobby. All the others require some degree of manual checking.
For example, checkpoint 1.1 requires you to "Provide a text equivalent for
every non-text element". Bobby can check all your images to see whether they
have alt text, but it cannot say whether that text is "equivalent" to the
image. Therefore it can only half test that checkpoint. At the extreme,
Bobby can't do anything. For example, checkpoint 14.1 requires you to "Use
the simplest and most straightforward language that is possible". There is
no way Bobby can test for this.
One out of sixteen may sound pretty bad for a checking tool, but the
strength of Bobby lies not in its ability to spot all the problems but in
the way it speeds up the process of checking. It's good at pointing out
where you should manually check for problems. And also good to help you
learn about accessibility problems and how to fix them. Every problem or
potential problem it finds contains a hyperlink to a decent explanation of
the underlying issue which also hyperlinks to further external explanations
and the WAI guidelines themselves. I see Bobby as a great jumping off point
to begin your accessibility check but take "Bobby Approved" with a pinch of
salt.
Mark
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