Accessible IT Frequently Asked Questions

No. "Bobby" was an web markup accessibility checker developed by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), and later sold to the Watchfire group. Although not the first, Bobby was one of the most popular checkers for web accessibility, partly due to a campaign that involved having pages, which passed an evaluation against the Section 508 standards, a seal that stated "Bobby Approved".

(example of the 'Bobby Approved' seal)

However, Bobby checks for Section 508 compliance was only partial at best, and did not guarantee accessibility of web pages. Confusion led many people to beleive that 'Bobby' was an actual standard, when in fact 'Bobby Approved' usually meant that the pages passed only a subset of the Section 508 Standards tested by the Bobby software.