Exploring variability of visual accessibility options in operating systems

Abstract

Digital technologies are an opportunity to overcome disabilities, provided that accessibility is ensured. In this paper, we focus on visual accessibility and the way it is supported in Operating Systems (OS). The significant variability in this support has practical consequences, e.g., the difficulty to recommend or select an OS, or migrate from one OS to another. This suggests building a variability model for OS that would classify them and would serve as a reference. We propose a methodology to build such a variability model with the help of the Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) framework. In addition, as visual accessibility can be divided into several concerns (e.g., zoom, or contrast), we leverage an extension of FCA, namely Relational Concept Analysis. We also build an ontology to dispose of a standardized description of visual accessibility options. We apply our proposal to the analysis of the variability of a few representative operating systems.