[WEB4LIB] Who reviews/validates the validator?

[Edward Spodick]

At 6:06 AM -0800 6/11/2002, sdunn at southeast.edu wrote:
>Has anyone ever seen a review of Bobby accessibility software?  I think it
>is important to have some review or validation of this validator, now that
>it is being sold by Watchfire.

Well, back in January 2001, before it was sold, it validated a page with basic errors including missing ALT tags.  Apparently the heavily javascript page I was testing confused the tool.  I just tried that page again in the online version (and yes - it is still missing some ALT tags, among other things).  The newer online version does not validate it - it fails to test it at all, giving a connection error.  The URL is http://www.seng.ust.hk/  (and no, I am not responsible for that server).

On the other hand, WAVE (http://www.temple.edu/instituteondisabilities/piat/wave/) does parse it.

I have not used the A-Prompt validator, as it runs on Windows, and I have a Mac, but you might want to take a look (http://aprompt.snow.utoronto.ca/index.html)

A short comparison of the 3 is at http://www.ncsu.edu/it/dss/webaccess/resources.html

Jim Thatcher also reviews LIFT (http://www.usablenet.com/)

I did find some reviews/comments at:
http://jimthatcher.com/bobbyeval.htm
http://jimthatcher.com/lifteval.htm
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/acctools.html

I expect that there are more and more detailed reviews, especially in the literature, but I only did some Google searches.

Good luck.
-- 
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Edward F Spodick, Information Technology Manager
Hong Kong University of Science & Technology Library
lbspodic at ust.hk  tel:852-2358-6743 fax:852-2358-1043