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Bobby 4.0
Michael Cooper
CAST, Inc.
39 Cross St.
Peabody, MA 01960
mcooper@cast.org
http://www.cast.org/bobby
Introduction
The Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) was founded to
study and develop ways technology can be used to enable people
with disabilities, especially in educational environments, to
participate in the mainstream. In recent years, CAST has refined
the concept of Universal Design for Learning (TM) (UDL). With
respect to technology, Universal Design refers to software and
hardware features that are created with a wide range of users in
mind. Universal Design for Learning is a set of principles for
the design of systems from which people gain information, such as
educational curricula, software products, or web sites.
While developing universally designed software products, CAST
found that products using Web pages rely in turn on Universal
Design features of those pages. To help authors incorporate those
features into their pages, CAST created Bobby (SM) (http://www.cast.org/bobby/).
This free software examines the structure of HTML pages and notes
technical or design issues that may present barriers to persons
with disabilities who access the site. The tool has helped
thousands of users and organizations make significant
improvements to their Web sites.
CAST is now developing Bobby version 4.0, which will have a
number of major enhancements that will enable it to assist a
larger group of web developers than before. Some features are
mentioned below; a beta version is expected by the time of the
conference and there will be an in-depth presentation of its new
features.
Bobby
The technology now exists to support inclusion of many different
types of people in ways that were previously unconsidered, yet
that technology is not always used to its maximum benefit. For
individuals with visual disabilities, for example, the Web's
highly graphical environment poses serious problems. Even with a
screen reader, a tool used by individuals with visual impairments
to translate written text into spoken text, Web pages can still
be inaccessible when screen readers cannot navigate text in
columns or recognize images. For individuals who are deaf or hard
of hearing, multimedia and audio elements of Web pages are
inaccessible without such accommodations as captioning or text
descriptions.
Applying the principles of Universal Design to a web site
requires awareness of and commitment to the issues. Equally
importantly, it requires enough applied understanding of these
issues to create effective universally designed web sites. That
is, an author must know the design principles that make a web
site universally designed, and the author must know technically
how to realize those principles on the web site. To help bring
this awareness about, CAST launched Bobby in August, 1996. Bobby
is a free interactive tool offered on CAST's web site that
analyzes an HTML page with respect to the WAI's Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines, and translates them into instructions
for improving its accessibility. After typing in a URL, Bobby
delivers a full report within seconds. This report optionally
includes the original page, with "Bobby-hat" icons that visually
show the location of errors.
Bobby then explains the factors that limit the site's use and
recommends ways to fix those problems. In the report, the factors
are presented as a list of error types. For each type, Bobby
identifies the parts of the page on which it is found. An
extended explanation of the cause of the error and means of
repairing it is available by clicking on the error's title. The
errors are organized by three levels of priority - Priority 1
issues are the most important to address for accessibility.
Within the priority levels, the report is also grouped into items
that it can evaluate automatically, and descriptions of items
that require human judgment to determine an appropriate response.
While any web page will require an amount of subjective
determination, Bobby is able to address many of the most numerous
access issues.
Bobby is designed to be an educational tool that teaches Web
designers about Web accessibility. As Web designers use Bobby,
they not only learn how to address problems within their own
site, they also learn skills that they can apply to site design
in the future. Bobby offers concrete design suggestions and is
linked to other sites that discuss access issues. The more one
uses Bobby, the less likely one is to need it in the future, as
accessibility issues and their solutions become integrated into
one's Web design at the outset.
New Features of Bobby 4.0 Until the release of version 3.1,
Bobby supported versions of the WAI guidelines that were still in
draft form and subject to revision. The guidelines have now
become a stable W3C Recommendation, enabling us to focus on
improving the depth of support. CAST is working with the WAI
Evaluation and Repair Working Group (http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/)
to define a set of technical approaches to accessibility
evaluation that support the Guidelines as completely as possible.
While the number of items Bobby examines on a web page is growing
as a result, we are also working on ways to simplify the
presentation of errors on a page so the user is not
overwhelmed.
Another important component of Universal Design in the modern
world is internationalization and multiculturalism. Already,
Bobby has been in the position of providing English-only reports
for non-English web pages from around the world. It is important
that Bobby be able to examine non-English pages in a manner
appropriate to the language and without misinterpreting non-Latin
character encodings, as well as to provide reports in that
language (or another language of the user's choice). Bobby 4.0
will have this support in a single international version that can
change language at the user's request. Support for specific
languages will be in the form of accessory modules that can be
added to Bobby with little or no user configuration required, or
by simply selecting a checkbox on the online version of
Bobby.
The quality and thoroughness of page examination will be
enhanced to give Bobby a more complete view of a web page. As
Bobby is enhanced, new types of optional checks will be added to
Bobby to expand its role as a Universal Web Page Design
Evaluation tool. Some check types under consideration include
spell checking, page readability, and site layout and visual
design. Some of these are topics related to human-computer
interaction principles about which a larger understanding is now
reaching the Web development community. Analysis and validation
of these issues will become as important as accessibility
evaluation in the near future.
Bobby will also broaden the context of its use by providing a
complete API that will allow other developers to integrate Bobby
into their products. This will be of value to developers of page
authoring programs who will be able to incorporate Bobby's
features directly into their product. This will also allow the
development of products that use Bobby's core functionality to
accomplish different goals; for example, Bobby is currently
expected to be integrated with an interactive repair tool that
steps the user through the process of fixing problems that Bobby
itself has merely identified and explained.
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