Engineering accessible Web applications

Abstract

Every day more and more users with different abilities and/or temporally or permanent disabilities are accessing the Web, and many of them have difficulties in reaching the desired information. However, the development of this kind of software is complicated for several reasons. Though some of them are technological, the majority are related with the need to compose different and, many times, unrelated design concerns which may be functional as in the case of most of the application’s requirements, or non-functional such as Accessibility. Even though, there is a huge number of tools and proposals to help developers assess Accessibility of Web applications, looking from the designer perspective, there is no such a similar situation. In this thesis, we present a novel approach to conceive, design and develop Accessible Web applications using concepts from Aspect-Orientation. In order to accomplish our goal, we provide some modeling techniques that we explicitly developed for handling the non-functional, generic and crosscutting characteristics of Accessibility. Specifically, we have enriched the UID technique with integration points to record Accessibility concerns that will be taken into account when designing the user interface. Then, by instantiating the SIG template with association tables, we work on an abstract interface model with Accessibility softgoals to obtain a concrete and accessible interface model for the Web application being developed. We explain deeply our ideas and point out the advantages of a clear separation of concerns throughout the development life-cycle. Thus, our proposal is based on recognized design techniques, which we embedded in a software tool to facilitate the transfer of the approach to the industry.