Bobby Certification

If you haven’t heard of Bobby certification before, then just know that it is a web-based service and a downloadable application.

When you run the URL of your website through the Bobby certification, the application will analyze and determine whether the web pages in your site are accessible to people with disabilities. The Bobby certification can also perform accessibility checks in a broader sense – that is, it can test whether or not web pages use HTML that is supported by particular web browsers.

What Happens after Running the Application

After running the Bobby certification either through the application that you downloaded or through its website (www.cast.org/bobby), the web page gets redisplayed, but this time with an accessibility report from Bobby appended at the bottom of the page.

The report will consist of the following:

* Accessibility errors – This contains problems that seriously affect the page’s usability by people with disabilities.
* Accessibility recommendations – These are access problems that you can fix.
* Accessibility questions – These are places where the Bobby certification thinks there might be an access error.
* Accessibility tips – This lists tips that you can apply to improve the overall accessibility of your site.
* Browser compatibility – This lists all those HTML elements and element attributes that are used on the page which are not valid for some particular browsers.
* Download time – This provides a summary of how long the web page and images would take to download on a slow modem line.

Now, you may also notice, besides the appended report that the Bobby certification generates along with the redisplayed web page, some blue Bobby hats with and without wheelchairs on them. What do these mean? You might ask.

Blue hats with wheelchairs mean that there is a disability access problem at a particular point in the web page. In simpler terms, a person with disability may have some problem accessing that portion of the web page.

On the other hand, if the blue hat does not have a wheelchair, then the problem has something to do with browser compatibility.

For a more detailed description, you may click on either type of Bobby hat.

What are the System Requirements for Running Bobby Certification?

Bobby certification is written in Java. Thus, the application requires a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) compatible with the Sun JVM 1.1. If you are using Windows OS or Solaris distributions, then you may already have a Java Virtual Machine included in the system.

To run Bobby certification, you need at least 16MB of memory. The speed should be at least as fast or faster than 100Mhz Pentium. Currently, Bobby will run under Windows 95/NT, Solaris, and Linux.

If you do not want to download the Bobby certification application, you also have the option to use the online version through their web-based service.