[Sigia-l] Re: Bobby Certification?

[llchrist at email.unc.edu]

Stephanie,

Josephine has given you some great resources to get you up to speed. I 
would also recommend a few other things. The industry standard for voice 
readers is JAWS. It's what blind people use so that their computers will 
read documents, web pages, application information, etc., to them. It's 
very, very expensive; but if you could get access to a computer with JAWS, 
you'll get a very good representation of how your website is actually being 
perceived. Although Bobby may tell you your site is okay, your site may not 
be read by JAWS exactly the way you'd like it to. Testing on JAWS is a real 
eye-opener (no puns intended here). Also, I would recommend trying to 
obtain the testing services of some blind users. Interviewing blind student 
users here at UNC (where I work) has made a big difference in my ability to 
improve the accessibility of my websites.

I realize that these are hard resources to come by. I work at a university 
and so I have access to both JAWS and blind student users. If there is a 
university near you, you may want to have a chat with the people who 
oversee disability services for the university. They may be willing to help 
you because, I would imagine, they care so much about making all things 
accessible to disabled users. It might be worth a shot if your company is 
not interested in or able to purchase JAWS.

Lastly, I would recommend checking out Dr. Norm Coombs website - 
http://www.rit.edu/~easi/. He is a guru on accessibility. He offers classes 
in making your site accessible. He's a very charming man who is very 
willing to help.

Good luck,
Laura

Message: 8
From: "Scott, Josephine" <Josephine.Scott at compuware.com>
To: "'sigia-l at asis.org'" <sigia-l at asis.org>
Cc: "'drbambiberger at msn.com'" <drbambiberger at msn.com>
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2003 09:00:32 -0500
Subject: [Sigia-l] Re: Bobby Certification?

>From: "Stephanie Berger" <drbambiberger at msn.com>

>Hello all,
>I have been asked to assist with the Bobby Certification for a portion of
my
>not -for-profit company's website. I am looking for pointers from those who

>have been through it before. Any and all help would be appreciated and I
>will happily summarize for the list.

Stephanie,

You are being asked to determine whether your site is accessible for persons
with differing abilities for whom using the traditional browser may be
difficult.  The Web site http://www.cast.org/bobby does have a free utility
that can give you an analysis for any public site.  You type in the URL,
choose your accessibility strategy (whether you want to follow U.S. Federal
guidelines section 508 or the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative level 1
guidelines) and it will give you an analysis of how well your site meets
those guidelines.

The challenge for you will be to understand the issues surrounding
accessibility and be able to distinguish between accessibility strategies.
You will need a little background in this both for the choice of strategy,
and to formulate your remediation plan, if you need one.  If Bobby is a
problem for you to use, there are also built in accessibility tools in
Dreamweaver these days.  There are other tools available at relatively low
costs.

If you have any specific questions, you can contact me directly.  I'm sure
others who monitor this list will also be of service.  In addition to Bobby,
there are some great resources on accessibility:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/
http://www.section508.gov
http://www.usability.gov/accessibility/index.html
http://www.webaim.org

to name a few.

Good luck in your endeavor.

Josephine Scott
Usability Specialist
Compuware
Josephine.Scott at Compuware.com