Tools for Best Practices Implementation

Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE)

The Illinois Functional Web Accessibility Evaluator is designed to test web sites for functional accessibility features as defined in the iCITA HTML Best Practices for implementation of the Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act, Section 508 requirements and W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Three types of reports are created. A summary report is useful for managers and developers to gain an overall view of the accessibility of a web site. A site wide report provides information regarding which pages pass, fail or have warnings within a web site. A page level report provides the details of the accessibility features and problems on a website. This tool is especially useful for auditing the HTML used in web sites as part of administrative initiatives to manage the accessibility of an organization's web resources.

• Illinois Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE)
• Register for free FAE account
• FAE version history
• FAE usage statistics

Strengths

• Generates summary and detailed reports on web accessibility of a web site
• Implements over 40 rules for functional web accessibility
• Provides specific markup recommendations to meet rule violations
• Easy-to-share reports with others through the use of public URIs to reports
• Easy navigation between reports
• Archives reports for future reference and sharing
• Links to iCITA HTML best practices for more information on accessibility and examples
• FREE service of the University of Illinois

Limitations

• Locating specific problems on a web page:
  For example, it does not provide line number information to indicate where the problem was found in source code. However, for web resources that are generated by server side scripting, line number information is not always helpful in identifying accessibility problems. Additionally, many rules do not have line numbers associated with them. For example, when heading markup is missing, it is impossible to provide the line numbers of where the heading would be placed.
• Analyzing dynamically generated HTML content for accessibility:
  The mechanism for acquiring HTML code for FAE does not execute javascript that is often used to create content. A replacement technology is being developed to allow content generated dynamically as the page loads to be analyzed for accessibility.

Firefox Accessibility Extension

The Firefox Accessibility Extension is designed to make information related to accessibility on a web page, easier to view, locate and evaluate. It provides mechanisms to automatically evaluate a variety of aspects of accessibility as well as mechanisms to manually examine web pages. The extension allows users to look at accessibility markup though lists, highlighting, keyboard shortcuts and alternate views of page content. Much like FAE, the extension provides accessibility evaluations based on the iCITA HTML Best Practices for implementation of the Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act, Section 508 requirements and W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The extension helps developers locate individual elements on a the web page that have been reported, via FAE or Firefox Accessibility Extension, as being inaccessible.

• Illinois Firefox Accessibility Extension
• W3C Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) Specification

Strengths

• Can analyze dynamically generated HTML content for accessibility features
• Elements on the page with rule violations can be highlighted for developers to identify specific elements with accessibility problems
• Implements over 40 rules for functional web accessibility
• Provides specific markup recommendations to meet rule violations
• Supports views of markup that can help with manual accessibility checks
• Links to iCITA HTML Best Practices for more information on accessibility and examples
• Can be used behind a fire wall for proprietary/sensitive web pages
• Contains links to other accessibility evaluation tools
• Includes dialogs to view and explore web widgets using the W3C Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) markup
• Beta rule set for testing the accessibility of ARIA enriched applications

Limitations

• Does not archive reports on accessibility
• Provides information only on the page with focus