Cast.org’s Bobby (no longer online) does an ace job of checking your site for compliance with the WAI and Section 508 accessibility standards. Not only that, the service is free. So what could be bad?
Well, what’s bad is that Bobby itself uses invalid markup, and the URLs it generates to help you keep track of your test results are also invalid. So if you cut and paste a Bobby-generated URL into your site to show your visitors you care about accessibility, your site will no longer be valid.
Until Cast fixes this problem (which we hope they do soon), you can work around it by replacing unescaped ampersand characters with the proper entities. If you don’t know how to do that, try the Hivelogic URL cleaner.
Cast is a wonderful organization, and with their limited budget, it can’t be easy to provide the services they offer. We’re all grateful for what they do. But we hope they’ll soon take the next step and rework their site’s markup and backend to comply with standards.