Agile Methods and Visual Specification in Software Development: A Chance to Ensure Universal Access

Within the eEurope2010 initiative "An Information Society for All", development methods which enable the inclusion of the end-user become essential in order to ensure the paradigm of Universal Access. It is important to understand the end-users, their behavior, their knowledge of technology and their abilities and the context in which the applications will be used. In this paper, we combine our experiences in both Agile Methods and Usability Engineering and show that the resulting agile usability methods - however these maybe designated - are ideally suited to design and develop applications which follow the idea of Universal Access and where the end-user is having great influence on systems design.

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