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Check sites for 508 with audit-edit tools

What Bobby found this year: Commerce had no errors

By Steve Graves, Special to GCN

Last year, GCN used the Bobby freeware tool from the Center for Applied Special Technology, at www.cast.org, to check the home pages of 20 agencies for Section 508 compliance [GCN, Sept. 4, 2000, Page 1].

Eight out of 13 pages at that time failed to reach Priority Level 1, the minimum accessibility level. After the June 21 deadline for 508 compliance passed, I repeated the test with Bobby.

Only five sites now fail to comply with the minimum standards: www.af.mil, www.army.mil, www.dol.gov, www.uscourts.gov and www.usda.gov.

Except for the U.S. Courts site, none had more than one Priority 1 error. Most errors were minor, such as a missing attribute for an image.

Last year, the 20 sites averaged 7.2 errors each. This year, the per-site errors fell to 5.5 for a 24 percent reduction.

The accessibility champ was the Commerce Department, which had no Priority 1, 2 or 3 errors. Least compliant was the U.S. Courts site with nine—two more errors than last year.