FAE is an open source web application that analyzes web pages for compliance with accessibility requirements defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and for proper use of accessibility features defined by the current HTML Standard (previously known as HTML5).
Web Accessibility Standards
Each evaluation rule that FAE uses is based on one or more of the requirements and features from the following widely-accepted standards:
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Success Criteria
- Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA)
- WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices Techniques
- HTML Standard
FAE and the companion tool, AInspector WCAG for Firefox, were designed to produce evaluation results that are structurally identical. They do so by utilizing the Evaluation Library, which comprises a set of over 120 evaluation rules.
These evaluation rules, which were developed in conjunction with partners from state government, industry and academia, are organized into categories with which most web developers are familiar, including headings, lists, forms, tables, etc.
While AInspector WCAG is used for evaluating a single web page, FAE is capable of evaluating entire websites through a technique known as web spidering. For more information on how FAE utilizes web spidering, see the example page.
FAE is designed to be used in conjunction with AInspector WCAG for Firefox and the Accessibility Bookmarklets to help people gain a comprehensive understanding of the accessibility features, issues and potential issues of a web resource.