WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

RE: "New" Accessibility Validator

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Oct 25, 2003 5:27PM

On Sat, 25 Oct 2003, Randy Pearson wrote:

> For HTML validation, we've started using CSE's HTML Validator Pro.

It's phoney. It is _not_ a validator but advertized as one. This has often
been stated in different Usenet groups, and its author is aware of this
and decided to ignore it, saying that it's not a "formal validator", which
is nonsense. Either it is a validator, or it is not. And it isn't.
They still keep selling it as one.

> It has a
> pretty nice way of organizing the validation messages you get.

Irrelevant. It does not do validation, so anything it presents as
validation is just its author's opinion.

> First of all,
> there is an Accessibility tab in the results pane that lets you see just
> those messages.

I'm not holding my breath. If it calls itself a validator but isn't, my
expectations with regard to accessibility checking are very low.

> Now, I'll eradily admit that I don't know how the accessibility rules engine
> stacks up with the others being discussed here, but in general I am quite
> pleased with this product so far.

Well, if you submit a valid page to the "validator", it claims that the
page has some amount (say 20) errors, and asks you to buy the product to
see what it reports. This fits my definition of "lying". I would not take
anything they say about accessibility at face value either. (And, not
surprisingly, their Web page has lots of accessibility problems.)

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


----
To subscribe, unsubscribe, suspend, or view list archives,
visit http://www.webaim.org/discussion/