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Accessible design and testing in the application development process: considerations for an integrated approach

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Abstract

Accessible design principles should permeate virtually all phases of the application development cycle, using existing “best practices of software engineering” for accessibility purposes. This paper proposes a methodology for accessible design and testing that includes proven tools of software engineering, namely use cases and scenarios, to capture functional requirements. Guidelines developed through user testing and heuristics are made real using personas to exemplify accessibility requirements, reflecting a diversity of user capabilities and use contexts. For implementation and testing, test cases containing accessibility checkpoints are generated, based on the guidelines. Complementary to this methodology, expert reviews and user testing should be conducted for evaluation of the developed products and further refinement of the development process.

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Notes

  1. Superstitious behavior occurs whenever someone does something in a certain way that has no correlation to facts—just because it worked that way before. For example, someone who always turns their phone off and back on at the end of a call because once they were unable to hang up without turning the phone off. Or someone who always deletes and reenters information into a new record rather than just editing the old record. Or someone that designs everything with a certain spacing because that was the rule of thumb they were given and they do not know what the basis was for deciding that spacing, so they just continue to do what they used to do (even if it is not necessary anymore—and even if it is not sufficient or correct anymore).

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, US Department of Education under Grant H133E030012 as part of the Universal Interface and Information Technology Access Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center of the University of Wisconsin -Trace Center. The opinions herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the funding agency.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Access Technologies Group, Wilhelm-Blos-Str. 8, 72793, Pfullingen, Germany

    Gottfried Zimmermann

  2. Trace R&D Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1550 Engineering Dr., 2107 Engineering Centers Bldg, Madison, WI, 53706-1609, USA

    Gregg Vanderheiden

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  1. Gottfried Zimmermann
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  2. Gregg Vanderheiden
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Correspondence to Gottfried Zimmermann.

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Zimmermann, G., Vanderheiden, G. Accessible design and testing in the application development process: considerations for an integrated approach. Univ Access Inf Soc 7, 117–128 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-007-0108-6

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