Functional web accessibility techniques and tools from the university of Illinois

Abstract

For web developers to create functionally accessible web resources they need more than general guidelines and tools that provide them with lists of manual accessibility checks. Web developers need specific web accessibility techniques and tools that help them verify they have correctly implemented the techniques. The techniques also need to support the wider concepts of the web of interoperability and device independence. The CITES/DRES Functional Web Accessibility Best Practices provide developers with specific techniques and requirements to implement Section 508 and W3C WCAG 1.0 requirements. The use of the Functional Web Accessibility Evaluation (FAE) Tool and the Mozilla/Firefox accessibility extension provide free and open source tools to allow developers to verify they have used the best practices.

A Support for Developers Implement the Accessibility Guidelines Regarding to Web Menus

“…According to [12], for web developers to create functionally accessible web resources they need more than general guidelines and tools that provide them with lists of manual accessibility checks. Web developers need specific web accessibility techniques and tools that help them verify they have correctly implemented the techniques.…”

“…al [12] used a Functional Accessibility Evaluation (FAE) Tool that provides a means to estimate the functional accessibility of web resources by analyzing web pages and estimating their use of the CITES/DRES (Disability Resources and Educational Services), web accessibility best practices. The tool does not determine if a resource or a collection of resources is accessible or not, but provide summary and detailed reports on the use of accessible markup categorized by the best practices principles.…”

A web accessibility assessment on the Texas public school system

“…Some more automated evaluation tools, such as Cynthia Says, utilize WCAG and Section 508 accessibility guidelines [21]. Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE) evaluates web sites and provides authors with directed feedback about accessibility in several categories [16] and WebInSight detects what impedes access to the web and offers suggestions to improve access [6]. However, many of the authors noted the shortcomings of automated evaluation tools in general.…”

Enabling an accessible web 2.0

“…The University of Illinois has developed a set of Web Accessibility Best Practices as well as a Functional Web Accessibility Evaluator (FAE) Tool to test a Web sites use of the Best Practices [17]. The Accessibility Best Practices are based on a set of five principles, Navigation and Orientation, Text Equivalents, Scripting and Automation, Styling, and Standards Coding techniques are provided to implement these principles.…”