A semantic accessibility assessment environment for design and development for the web

Abstract

The Web is now increasingly being accessed by many people with disabilities. Thus, the great heterogeneity of Web application technologies as well as the provided Web content requires the introduction of accessibility aspects in order to fulfill the preferences for all people with disabilities or not. For that reason accessibility support at all stages of the design and development process of Web applications should be a solution that appears in the horizon. New developed Web applications should be fully adapted to different user needs, and totally accessible regardless of the specific condition of end users. Our approach introduces an advanced semantic accessibility assessment environment which initializes semantic models representing the most of main accessibility constrains and terms which are required for the design and development of Web applications, through the use of generic and domain ontologies. The proposed assessment environment can be used for the accessibility assessment of Web applications during the design and development phase. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.