Making accessibility accessible: strategy and tools

Abstract

Standards, rules and principles that offer useful recommendations for producing accessible content do exist, but conformance is often not adequately enforced by actual implementations. It is fairly frequent for content authors to produce material that ends up not being accessible without them even noticing it, even when using specialized tools and services. In addition to a well-known scarcity of awareness and even interest, an important reason for this is the difficulty of evaluating and perceiving, for non disabled designers and developers, the impact of accessibility issues on people with disabilities, and existing tools do little or nothing to reduce this “handicap”. Under these assumptions, we plan to work on a new approach based on declarative markup to improve the design and evaluation of accessible content and services. In particular, our strategy encompasses the combined usage of a declarative framework of accessible web components, (to significantly reduce the efforts and knowledge required to produce accessible content), automated accessibility testing tools (tightly integrated in the traditional development workflows), and innovative direct testing tools that let non-disabled people represent accessibility issues in their works as perceptions in ways they are more familiar with. We argue that, in contrast with the more traditional approach to web accessibility based on highly specialized competency and reliance on external tools, our approach has the potential to make accessibility more accessible for development teams that neither have the necessary knowledge to produce accessible content and implement accessible services, nor can afford the cost to acquire them from the outside.

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