Universal design principles combined with web accessibility guidelines: a case study

Accessibility evaluation processes currently face important issues. One is the difficulty to understand the issues pointed out in accessibility guidelines and the procedure to correct them. Other regards the coverage of the accessibility guidelines in relation to the whole technical and social aspects, and contexts of use. Those deficiencies contribute to the low adherence to recommendations and naive solutions since designers usually are not experts in accessibility. Aiming at contributing to this scenario in clarifying understanding and action towards the development of accessible code we proposed a merging of accessibility guidelines for web content from WCAG 2.0 and accessibility physical recommendations from ISO 9241 to Universal Design principles and guidelines. To evaluate our approach we conducted a case study involving students in computer science and specialists in web accessibility. As results we verified relevant contributions regarding the number and quality of the identified accessibility issues even for the specialists in accessibility.