About FAE: Overview

What is FAE?

The Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE) analyzes web resources for markup that is consistent with the use of CITES/DRES HTML Best Practices for development of functionally accessible web resources that also support interoperability.

The CITES/DRES HTML Best Practices are not a new standard, but rather a statement of techniques for implementation of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and United States Federal Government Section 508 standards. Following the best practices in developing web resources not only improves accessibility for people with disabilities, but also improves interoperability, giving everyone the benefit of having more options for accessing and using those resources.

Running the Evaluator

The “Run FAE” page provides a form for specifying the following analysis parameters:

URL(s)
Specifies the page(s) to be evaluated. When one and only one URL is specified, that page will serve as the starting point of the analysis, along with additional pages, depending on the “Depth of Evaluation” and “Follow Links in” settings (see below). When multiple URLs are specified, the “Depth of Evaluation” parameter is set to “Top-level page only” and “Follow Links in” does not apply.
Report Title
The title to be displayed at the top of each report page. If no title is specified, then “Untitled Report” is displayed.
Depth of Evaluation
When “Top-level page only” is selected, only the page specified by the URL will be analyzed.
“Include all second-level pages” will cause all pages linked from the top-level page (with domain restrictions as explained below) to be included in the analysis.
“Include all third-level pages” will cause all pages linked from the top- and second-level pages (with domain restrictions as explained below) to be included in the analysis.
Follow Links in
In cases where “Depth of Evaluation” is set to either “Include all second-level pages” or “Include all third-level pages” the web crawler used by FAE can follow links in two different ways:
When “Specified domain only” is selected, link following is restricted to the same domain as the specified URL.
When “Next-level subdomains” is selected, links that are in subdomains of the next-level domain (relative to the domain specified by the URL) will also be followed.
Note that when a URL is specified in the “URL(s)” field, the label text for the “Follow Links in” buttons changes to indicate specific domain names. For example, if “news.google.com” is entered, the text “Specified domain only” is changed to “news.google.com domain only” and “Next-level subdomains” is changed to “All google.com subdomains”.

After successfully completing the analysis, FAE displays the Summary Report, which provides a high-level view of the evaluation results, and places a link to this report in the Archived Reports list. This list includes additional report information such as the analysis date/time, the number of pages analyzed, and the report title or, in the case of no title, the URL.

Analysis Categories

FAE organizes the analysis of documents based on the following categories:

Navigation & Orientation:
Inclusion of structural markup that facilitates navigation and contextual orientation;
Text Equivalents:
Proper use of images for interoperability and the provision of text descriptions for non-text content;
Scripting:
Avoidance of scripting techniques that compromise accessibility and interoperability;
Styling:
Use of CSS styling techniques to separate content and structural information from styling and presentation;
Standards:
Support for standards to improve interoperability and provide more choices in the use of technologies for rendering web content.

Linking Directly to FAE

It is now possible to place a link to FAE on a web page that, when selected, causes FAE to evaluate the page and display the resulting Summary Report. The following HTML snippet should be used:

<a href="http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu/evaluate.php?mode=link">Check Accessibility with FAE</a>

Evaluating Dynamic and/or Protected Web Resources

To analyze pages that do not have static URLs and/or require an account login for access, the Mozilla/Firefox Accessibility Extension is available. It now includes functionality for sending copies of such pages directly to FAE for generating Summary and Page Reports.

In the interest of privacy, any pages that are analyzed by FAE, including those sent by the Accessibility Extension, are immediately deleted once the evaluation reports have been generated.