Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for EIAO
What is the software license of EIAO?
All software developed in the project will be released under the GPL License .For software used to carry out evaluations transparency is an essential requirement. The software is free to download, use, review and even to change. This freedom is particularly important for software used for evaluation so that those who are interested can find out how the evaluation really works. It is also possible to propose improvements. The Open Source license ensures access to source code and seems very natural for software developed to evaluate accessibility:
- Access to code for verification of evaluation method. A fully transparent evaluation method is important for the credibility of the result.
- Freedom to improve and use the validation methods. Further installations of the system will enable additional teams to experiment and to contribute.
- Localisation (web interface, development guidelines). Local language is important for accessibility and for acceptance in additional countries.
- To allow for integration of vendor owned evaluation modules a web service interface is also provided.
What is UWEM?
UWEM means "Unified Web Evaluation Methodology" and it is an European methodology for conformance evaluation and large scale benchmarking. It is developed by the WabCluster, the Web Accessibility Benchmarking Cluster which is a cluster of European projects established to develop a harmonized European methodology for evaluation and benchmarking of web site accessibility. Read more on http://www.wabcluster.org/index.html.
Why there is the need for UWEM when there are WCAGs ?
Even with the same set of guidelines, checking a web site’s accessibility can be carried out in different ways. Therefore there has been a need to develop the Unified Web Evaluation Methodology( UWEM )to ensure that evaluations are compatible and coherent with the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines ( WCAG 1.0 )part of the broad-reaching Web Accessibility Initiative( WAI ).
Is UWEM an official EU methodology?
The methodology is developed by three European research (FP6 IST) projects in the area of e-inclusion. The projects are grouped under the European Web Accessibility Benchmarking Cluster ( WAB Cluster ). They aim to establish UWEM as the basis for web accessibility evaluation and certification in Europe. The UWEM development is financially supported by the European Commission DG Information Society and Media .
What are the future plans for UWEM ?
UWEM 1.0 was published in November 2006. Since then the work on UWEM has continued. Several reviews and feedback from accessibility experts has lead to the new and current version UWEM 1.2, with in creased usability and coherence. UWEM are open to comments and contributes: feel free to send comments and any relevant input which can improve the quality of our work.
feedback@eiao.net
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Is it possible to prevent the Observatory from crawling a web site?
Robots.txt is a standard document that can tell EIAO crawlers not to download some or all information from a web server. The format of the robots.txt file is specified in the Robot Exclusion Standard [ROBOTSTXT].
Could you crawl web sites a bit less aggressively?
If a web site supports HTTP if-modified-since or last-modified, the crawler will only download web pages that have been updated since the last crawl. If a site does not support these features, it is impossible for the crawler to know which pages have been changed since the last evaluation. Without such information, the crawler will need to download 6000 pages, or complete web sites, in order to do a representative evaluation of the site.
In other words, by supporting last-modified site owners will drastically reduce the load on a web site. For more info on how to use last-modified see HTTP1.1 .
If you still think we are crawling too aggressively or the crawler is causing you any sort of inconvenience, please provide us some indication of this, like weblogs, and comments so that we can improve our work:
feedback@eiao.net
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