Summary

  • John T. Whelan asked whether a relativity homepage could display a Bobby badge only after every page in its physics department met the requirements.
  • The discussion put the site's boundary in the webmaster's hands; 1999 documents made the covered scope, manual checks and rechecking after an upgrade explicit.

Before putting a small approval badge on a web page, must you first bring an entire physics department to order? John T. Whelan had a practical reason to ask. His pages formed self-contained collections inside larger websites he did not control. The address bar showed a neighbourhood; his editing authority covered a smaller plot.

On 18 August 1998, he raised the problem on the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative mailing list. Bobby, CAST's page-checking tool, offered an approval icon. The wording about all pages on a site left him wondering where the site ended. Did the relativity homepage under physics.utah.edu/research/relativity depend on every page under the department's host passing? That would require getting every member's personal pages made accessible. Whelan's question, preserved in the exchange with the Bobby team, turned an innocent-looking badge into an organisational chart.

The host was larger than the job

David Clark replied from CAST as a member of the Bobby team. He described a tension between the quick yes-or-no verdict webmasters wanted and the different people and tools through which a page would be used. Bobby had begun as assistance for developers; people had come to treat it as a benchmark. The icon now carried expectations larger than the original job.

Clark located the decision with the webmaster. That person defined the site and decided whether to display the icon, using the team's suggested requirements as guidance. This gave a maintainer room to name a manageable collection. It also put the work of explaining that collection beside the work of checking its pages.

Al Gilman's reply supplied a more useful map than a shared hostname. He proposed treating a site as pages on a coherent topic, with consistent navigation aids and an easily found person or organisation responsible for the content. Such a collection could cross DNS hosts and take an irregular shape in URL space. A neat address hierarchy was only one way of arranging the furniture.

There was a price for the freedom. If shortening the current URL would not help a lost visitor find their bearings, navigation needed extra care. A collection could make sense to its editor while leaving a reader stranded between its pieces. The badge's boundary had to be usable by somebody who had never seen the server's directory tree.

The tick still came with homework

The question acquired more explicit paperwork in 1999. Section 5 of the original WCAG 1.0 Recommendation of 5 May required one form of conformance claim to identify its scope: a page, a site or a defined part of a site, alongside the guideline version and level. Its alternative form used W3C icons on the pages making the claim. Those were W3C's own conformance icons. Bobby had its separate approval badge.

On 10 June, Clark announced Bobby 3.1.1. Its approval rating followed the new guidelines' Priority 1 requirements, including checks the software could perform and checks a person had to make. A new report section gathered the manual checks. Previously approved pages were to be checked again with the new version within 90 days. The badge had acquired a calendar as well as a boundary.

The human work was concrete. WCAG explained that an image's text equivalent should serve its purpose: a decorative picture of Earth, a lesson in geography and a picture linking to information about Earth could need different wording. A field containing some text leaves the question of what that text does. The document also called for automated checks, human review and feedback from people with disabilities.

Bobby's own application was part of the work. The 1999 release described support for Java-based assistive technologies and reports that could open in the user's usual browser and be printed. The person doing the checking needed a usable tool too. Accessibility work extended from the page, through the report, to the person expected to act on it.