[thelist] Bobby not free anymore (now Watchfire have it)

[Tony Crockford]

> > How, exactly, will that help the cause of accessibility?
>
> well it won't i guess, but how do you plan on supporting
> their cause? do
> you have bandwidth/money you can donate to them to keep their service
> running as it used to?
>
> of course it is possible that they see the Bobby service as a
> marketable
> way to make a profit (which isn't bad btw, profit that is), but they
> could also be hurting for cash and can no longer provide the service
> like they used to. is that not possible?
>
> chris.

As Watchfire freely admit they have a commercial interest in operating
Bobby and acquired it from CAST for that purpose I think their motives
are clear, if not clearly stated.

http://www.watchfire.com/news/pressRelease.asp?ID=73



My concern is that the barriers to creating accessible web sites are
already high and that removing one of the free ways to check sites just
raises the barrier still higher.

Are there good *commercial* reasons for working so hard to make a site
accessible by a small percentage of potential viewers?

Many people think not. The additional cost of checking your creation
against an accepted standard will strengthen the belief that compliance
costs too much and we'll be heading back in the wrong direction again.

I've already started to investigate the possibility of developing an
open source alternative that will be released under a copyleft licence
so that accessibility checking can be as easy as code validation.

Anyone with time to spare can join the accessibility debate on the
MACCAWS list.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/maccaws/

Thanks

Tony

--
http://www.maccaws.org/
[Making A Commercial Case for Adopting Web Standards]