Early Accessibility Evaluation in Web Application Development

Existing accessibility guidelines are mainly focused on runtime behavior and do not provide recommendations and evaluation for conceptual design of Web applications. Our approach aims to support more abstract principles for analysis and design of accessible Web applications. Combined with a prototype evaluation, it provides early integration of accessibility requirements into the process of Web application development. The approach is based on a model-driven user interface design method. Analysis of tasks and workflow is used to design a prototype which is evaluated with a simple screening technique to get fast and efficient results on selected accessibility requirements. The longtime objective of this work is a general concept for software development which bridges the gap between user requirements and developers needs in the field of accessibility.