Web Accesible Design Centred on User Experience

Proceedings of the 26th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication - SIGDOC '08, 2008

Including accessibility in the design of Websites 1.0 entails difficulties, but this situation becomes more complicated when the user becomes a creator in the web. There are new requirements to be considered in the design due to the user's active interaction in the web 2.0 environment, such as the web pages with user-generated content (like Blogs), where there are not

2012

Web Engineering (WE) methods have evolved to support different concerns during the development process of current Web-based systems, as context-awareness, Business-to- Business (B2B) process modeling, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and live-regions or quality factors to improve users' experience. Therefore, developers have conceptual tools to focus on these concerns in advance, but unfortunately, the situation is not the same to early accessibility design. In this paper we provide a briefly overview of our proposal, called Aspect-Oriented Web Accessibility Design (AO-WAD), and generalize its use within some of the best known WE approaches to provide accessibility support through Aspect- Orientation techniques. We embed AO-WAD into OOHDM, UWE and OOWS methods and propitiate an ease understanding through a motivating example.

Disability and Rehability: Assistive Technology

"Purpose This article asserts that current approaches to enhance the accessibility of Web resources fail to provide a solid foundation for the development of a robust and future-proofed framework. In particular, they fail to take advantage of new technologies and technological practices. The article introduces a framework for Web adaptability, which encourages the development of Web-based services that can be resilient to the diversity of uses of such services, the target audience, available resources, technical innovations, organisational policies and relevant definitions of 'accessibility'. Method The article refers to a series of author-focussed approaches to accessibility through which the authors and others have struggled to find ways to promote accessibility for people with disabilities. These approaches depend upon the resource author's determination of the anticipated users' needs and their provision. Through approaches labelled as 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, the authors have widened their focus to account for contexts and individual differences in target audiences. Now, the authors want to recognise the role of users in determining their engagement with resources (including services). To distinguish this new approach, the term 'adaptability' has been used to replace 'accessibility'; new definitions of accessibility have been adopted, and the authors have reviewed their previous work to clarify how it is relevant to the new approach. Results Accessibility 1.0 is here characterised as a technical approach in which authors are told how to construct resources for a broadly defined audience. This is known as universal design. Accessibility 2.0 was introduced to point to the need to account for the context in which resources would be used, to help overcome inadequacies identified in the purely technical approach. Accessibility 3.0 moved the focus on users from a homogenised universal definition to recognition of the idiosyncratic needs and preferences of individuals and to cater for them. All of these approaches placed responsibility within the authoring/publishing domain without recognising the role the user might want to play, or the roles that other users in social networks, or even Web services might play. Conclusions Adaptability shifts the emphasis and calls for greater freedom for the users to facilitate individual accessibility in the open Web environment. "

Flexibility and adaptivity are two of the outstanding characteristics of new media and new technologies. These properties allow new methods to provide physically challenged people with appropriate information. To build accessible Web applications, one has to respect the needs from the beginning of the design process. However, it is difficult to integrate the requirements of accessibility guidelines into modern web design. Based on recent proposals for model-based Web application development, we discuss the essential modeling requirements to ensure enhanced accessibility in Web applications.

"The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has a well-established framework for addressing accessibility based on three components: the accessibility of Web content, accessibility support in browsers and accessibility support in authoring tools, with a corresponding set of guidelines for each. These guidelines have been successful in raising awareness in Web accessibility at a political level, but have been less successful than might have been expected influencing the wider promotion and adoption of accessibility in Web technology. This is increasingly apparent as Web content becomes increasingly heterogeneous in terms of source, type, author and function. Standards, policy and guidelines overwhelmingly focus on accessibility of the end product – i.e. the Web page or site - and not the process used to create it. This is at odds with the transformation of Web-based user goals from receipt of static information to communication, and receipt or delivery of services and experiences. Thus it is the accessibility of the end goal that should be critical, and is dependent on the quality of the route(s) available to reaching that goal - making assessing accessibility of a technical unit such as a Web page less relevant. Instead, we argue a holistic approach is necessary – one that views positively, where appropriate, aggregation of alternatives in a way that allows each route to provide the best possible chance for disabled users to achieve the end goal, even if individual routes may themselves exclude certain groups. Since 2004 the authors have developed a framework for addressing the accessibility of Web resources, inspired by the holistic use of Web technology in e-learning, building on WAI guidelines but providing the flexibility needed to address the limitations of the guidelines and the diverse ways in which the Web is now being used. This paper reflects how the influence and impact of WCAG has changed over time, and, by reviewing the authors’ work conducted in recent years, considers how a more holistic approach to Web Accessibility in a Web 2.0 world can best be achieved. "

2012

Mature Web Engineering (WE) approaches provide good resources for developing Web 2.0 applications. The state-of-the-art shows that many of these approaches have evolved for providing support to different issues during the development process of these kind of applications, as business-to-business process modeling, context-awareness, RIAs and live-regions or quality factors for improving users’ experience. Focusing on Accessibility, having full support usually means being tightly coupled to host process and models, which prevents conveying this support to other WE approaches. In this paper we introduce our proposal, called Aspect-Oriented Web Accessibility Design (AO-WAD), and generalize its use within WE approaches to provide Accessibility support applying Aspect-Orientation techniques. We embed AO-WAD into OOHDM and UWE methods to propitiate an ease understanding through a motivating example.

Journal of Information and …, 2007

Semantic Web approaches try to get the interoperability and communication among technologies and organizations. Nevertheless, sometimes it is forgotten that the Web must be useful for every user, consequently it is necessary to include tools and techniques doing Semantic Web be accessible. Accessibility and usability are two usually joined concepts widely used in web application development, however their meaning are different. Usability means the way to make easy the use but accessibility is referred to the access possibility. For the first one, there are many well proved approaches in real cases. However, accessibility field requires a deeper research that will make feasible the access to disable people and also the access to novel non-disable people due to the cost to automate and maintain accessible applications. In this paper, we propose one architecture to achieve the accessibility in web-environments dealing with the WAI accessibility standard and the Universal Design paradigm. This architecture tries to control the accessibility in web applications development life-cycle following a methodology starting from a semantic conceptual model and leans on description languages and controlled vocabularies.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009

The treatment of Web accessibility is not only following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to strictly comply with technical aspects. The development processes of web applications are very much centred in the architecture, which are normally very distant to the user. This requires integrating usability and accessibility in software engineering processes incorporating a User-Centered Design (UCD) and Inclusive Design. In this paper, an integration of usability techniques in the whole life cycle of a web application is shown. This work is part of AWA framework (Accessibility for Web Applications) that provides a methodological support for the development of accessible web applications.

2008

Proceedings of the 31st ACM international conference on Design of communication - SIGDOC '13, 2013

The Web is currently the main way of providing computing services, reaching a larger number of users with different characteristics. As the complexity and interactivity of systems is increased, users become more demanding towards all the requirements associated to their distinct needs. Implementing the interaction requirements in the Web has become the main focus of accessibility and usability studies, describing essential design features which provide users with quality, assured systems. The focus on the users reinforced that as the number of users grows and the system became available to a wide variety of users, accessibility and usability features become even more critical to a Web application's success. In this paper, we present ACCESSA, a practical approach to rapidly improve the accessibility of existing Web systems, acting mainly in the interface design with no changes to the functional requirements of systems. The ACCESSA is based on the WCAG 2.0 guidelines and other patterns, choosing the guidelines that present lower implementation costs and represent higher severity accessibility issues.