section 508 compliance question

adavis

Does anyone out there know of a good tool for validating php scripts for 508 compliance? Does anyone out there even worry about having their sites 508 compliant?

daynah

There's always Bobby.

http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp

You don't really validate the PHP code, but instead validate the output of it. 🙂

adavis

Yeah, but when you have a large project, it's a real pain to "view source" on every possible twist and turn a script could make. It would be nice to have a tool that renders all the possiblities and then checks those.

As far a Bobby goes, my company doesn't like it for some reason. They think they need to spend money on a tool before it's worth using. Go figure
😕

matt_4013

And yet they use php? Seems a bit hypocritical 🙂

But anyway, you'll probably find that if your pages are compliant with the w3 consortium's HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.1 standards, they'll be very very close to 508 anyway, considering for web apps that's what 508 is based on. But AFAIK there isnt anything out there that will test your entire application for validity. I always validate manually, put something in, check it, if it works, yay, try a different thing, then validate that, etc. Takes a bit of extra time, but personally I think it's worth it 😉

adavis

Oh, the PHP/mySQL is MY choice. Most of my department's work is in ASP and Perl. I'm the only PHP programmer in the group.

It's really only about 20 pages. I have rendered them all and saved them as html for Infocus validation. The problem was that my Infocus wasn't working for some reason and all projects have to be reviewed by a standards board. Each site must go through a 3 page check list and be run through HTML validator, CSS validator, and be Section 508 compliant before they are released to the customer.

I was just hoping that there was an easier way and since my Infocus isn't working, could get a waiver to use something else that is more compatible with scripts.

Oh well...

mystrymaster

I imagine you could use a tool like winrunner to capture your mouse movements and the play it back as a testing plan and have that save all the files for you. You would have to do it once but then you could just run the macro again and that would save all the nelwy formed pages.

I would think there would have to be something out there with a php parser in it that could validate it all.