A mechanism for identifying dynamic components in rich internet applications

Abstract

The web has provided users with interactivity through Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). However, due to the dynamic nature of RIAs, most applications still do not implement accessible solutions in their components for a variety of reasons, such as the lack of specialized knowledge by developers. Besides, there is a lack of tools capable of performing an automatic evaluation for accessibility in RIAs. To automatically evaluate accessibility in RIAs, tools mainly require the identification of the dynamic components. In this paper, we propose a solution that aims to automatically identify widgets in RIAs, by simulating interactions of a real user with a web application, through all the possible events their elements can receive. The developed mechanism extracts the properties of the dynamic elements to compose a database to guide the classification of specific widgets. We evaluated the potential of the mechanism, by applying it with different implementations of a particular widget, the Calendar. Also, the mechanism was tested in a controlled environment to verify more accurately the changes that occur on a web page, which could precisely identify the widgets as Calendars.