You may also consider a pre-developed tool, Bobby, which you can download and test your entire site for more than just the ALT tag problem. Bobby's been sites many times with Section 508 regulations for government web sites in order to improve accessiblity and is a well-trusted tool by others.
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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com
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"You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
"I can see my house from here!"
It's not what you know, but knowing how to find it if you don't know that's important
| [reply] |
The quickest way to do this is to use HTML Tidy. You can download it here. When you attempt to "Tidy" a page, it will give you plenty of hints about accessibility. If you're careful, you could just write a spider for your site and call tidy with backticks.
Side note: I used to do some programming for Special Olympics and I'm glad to see that there are others out there who care about this issue :)
Cheers,
Ovid
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| [reply] |
Like Ovid and Masem, I'm going to recommend an external tool.
If you (or your designers) are using Macromedia Dreamweaver for page design, there is a really nice extension for testing usability on the Macromedia site. It is configurable and is capable of some very detailed tests.
If you decide to go ahead and build something similar in Perl, though, I'd like to see it! :-)
Impossible Robot | [reply] |
I think, good names for links might also be an important issue, but this might be difficult to check automatically...
Best regards,
perl -e "print a|r,p|d=>b|p=>chr 3**2 .7=>t and t" | [reply]
[d/l] |
Using the modules HTML::Treebuilder and HTML::Element should make this job rather easy. Here's a quick script that would probably do the job.
use HTML::Element;
use HTML::TreeBuilder;
my $root = HTML::TreeBuilder->new;
$root->parse_file('foo.html'); # source file
foreach my $img ($root->find_by_tag_name('img')) {
my $alt = $img->attr('alt');
if(!$alt) {
my $bad_img = $img->attr('src');
print "There is no alt tag for the image $bad_img\n";
}
}
For more info, I would highly suggest reading Sean M. Burke's articles in The Perl Journal #18 and #19 located in the archives at tpj.com. | [reply] |