Accessibility Checking

After the markup was written, a quick check from Bobby confirmed that it passed most major accessibility checkpoints. A few quick changes were needed before launch to fix the few glitches that Bobby noticed. A link labeled "AAA" was added to the footer of the Zen Garden to signify that accessibility had been taken care of.

Or had it? It turns out that Bobby is not the final word when it comes to accessibility. If you familiarize yourself with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by the W3C (see "Better Accessibility" earlier in this chapter you'll soon realize there are guidelines that Bobby simply can't check. Checkpoint 2.1, for example, states that all information conveyed through color needs to be available to the viewer without color as wellsoftware like Bobby has no way of distinguishing this, especially if the information and color are embedded in an image.

Note

Bobby (http://bobby.watchfire.com/) is an online accessibility checker. There are others, such as Cynthia Says (www.cynthiasays.com) and WebAIM's Wave (http://wave.webaim.org/).

In fact, if you do some digging on the Bobby site, you'll also find this disclaimer:

"Accessibility is ultimately a human endeavor. It is determined by whether or not a diverse group of people with a variety of abilities and disabilities can access information efficiently. Bobby is just one step in helping to make web pages more accessible, but cannot guarantee total accessibility."

Frequently Asked Questions
http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/faq.jsp#faq_onetool

So the Zen Garden's HTML theoretically passed all accessibility checkpoints related to markup but there are further checkpoints that go beyond HTML. A few of them even apply to CSS, and it became evident over time that some designs weren't taking these into account. And when you consider the accessibility implications of Fahrner Image Replacementwhich we'll discuss more in Chapter 4it's easy to see how the CSS can quickly cause problems that no automated checker can diagnose.

The lesson learned is that automated tools like Bobby may serve as a useful starting point for building accessible Web sites, but WCAG provides many more checkpoints that are equally as important, which it cannot check for you.