Authors: Lourdes Moreno, Paloma Martínez, Belén Ruiz-Mezcua HCII 2009: 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. 5th International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction (HCII 2009), (July 2009, San Diego, CA, USA). Integrating HCI in a Web accessibility engineering approach

1. Integrating HCI in a Web
Accessibility engineering approach
Lourdes Moreno, Paloma Martínez, Belén Ruiz-Mezcua
Labda Group, Computer science department
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
{lmoreno, pmf, bruiz}@inf.uc3m.es

2. Lourdes Moreno, “Integrating HCI in a Web Accessibility engineering approach”, Universidad Carlos III de
Introduction
• The web offers many services, but these are not accessible to
all
• The accessibility barriers affect a wide range of users and
usage contexts
• Legislation about web accessibility in some countries
• Standardization: Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
• The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
– The treatment of Web accessibility is not only following
the WCAG to strictly comply with technical aspects
⇒To take into account the user experience
⇒ With Inclusion

3. Lourdes Moreno, “Integrating HCI in a Web Accessibility engineering approach”, Universidad Carlos III de
Motivation
Web application development process
• Accessible development implies some difficulties
• Which method to follow to include accessibility criteria
in the process?:
Software engineering (SE). Web engineering (WE)
 Methodologies: traditional, agile , …
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). User Centred Design
(UCD) methodologies
 Relationship between usability and accessibility

4. Lourdes Moreno, “Integrating HCI in a Web Accessibility engineering approach”, Universidad Carlos III de
Motivation
Conflicts between disciplines?
• SE, WE: Very focused on the architecture
• HCI: Very focused on the user
⇒To integrate usability and accessibility in software
engineering processes incorporating a User-Centered
Design (UCD) and Inclusive Design
 With the integration of usability techniques in the
web application development Life Cycle

5. Lourdes Moreno, “Integrating HCI in a Web Accessibility engineering approach”, Universidad Carlos III de
AWA
(Accessibility for Web Applications)
• To provide a methodological support for the development of
accessible web applications
• Based on two disciplines:
– Web engineering which provides specific modelling techniques
– UCD approach which provides usability techniques
• To define specific accessibility requirements and mechanisms to be
included in the developed process
– Accessibility Mechanisms to extend to web engineering methods
• To include accessibility requirements result from abstracting the
WCAG, called AWA _WCAG
– Accessibility Mechanisms to take into account the user as active
participant in the development process, called AWA_Interaction

6. Lourdes Moreno, “Integrating HCI in a Web Accessibility engineering approach”, Universidad Carlos III de
This work: AWA_Interaction
• (a) How to follow a UCD methodology with inclusion
and usability techniques such as Interviews, User
Profile, Person, Scenarios, Card Sorting, Prototyping
and Heuristic Evaluations
• (b) How to integrate the results of these techniques
on the different models, steps and artefacts in a
design process

7. Requirement capture
43
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Conceptual model Navigation model Presentation model
Analysis phase
Design phase
web Interface
Implementation
web code
(2) To Include the knowledge obtained
of AWA_Interaction in models and
interface design
(2) To Include the knowledge obtained
of AWA_Interaction in models and
interface design
AWA_WCAG
Abstract WCAG concepts
AWA_WCAG
Abstract WCAG concepts
AWA_WCAG
Valid and
accessible code
AWA_WCAG
Valid and
accessible code
Evaluation
(1) AWA_Interaction: Usability techniques with
inclusion
(1) AWA_Interaction: Usability techniques with
inclusion
(3) AWA_Interaction
Evaluation techniques
(3) AWA_Interaction
Evaluation techniques

8. Lourdes Moreno, “Integrating HCI in a Web Accessibility engineering approach”, Universidad Carlos III de
Usability techniques to be integrated into
web modeling
• Requirements capture
– Ethnographic Studies and interviews
• Analysis
– User Profile, Persona and Scenarios
– Card Sorting
• Design
– Low cost prototypes and Visual Brainstorming
• Evaluation
– User tests: Questionnaires, Interviews
– Heuristic Evaluation

9. Lourdes Moreno, “Integrating HCI in a Web Accessibility engineering approach”, Universidad Carlos III de
Case study: Spanish Centre of Captioning and Audio
Description (CESyA) (www.cesya.es )
• Case study to show the accessibility mechanism of
AWA_Interaction
• Experiments to apply a UCD approach with inclusion
incorporating usability techniques in the design process
Spanish award for the
more accessible public
website in 2008

10. Lourdes Moreno, “Integrating HCI in a Web Accessibility engineering approach”, Universidad Carlos III de
Case study
Navigation Model
 With the data resulting from Card Sorting
=> Structural markup of web contents
according to the user mental model => The
initial logical structure of the Navigational
Model
1
 With this structure and data resulting from
Scenarios => Nodes and navigational links of
Navigational Model
2
 With data resulting from Card Sorting => The labeling
of web contents and the purpose of each navigational
link
3

11. Lourdes Moreno, “Integrating HCI in a Web Accessibility engineering approach”, Universidad Carlos III de
Case study
Presentation Model and Web Interface
 All knowledge gained from user
modeling (User Profile, Person and
Scenarios) is taken into account:
 Abstract presentation
 Concrete presentation with
CSS for the web interface
 With the prototyping and Visual
brainstorming techniques these
design decisions are validated
4
5
 The abstract Presentation can be
inferred from the output from
Prototyping and User Profile
techniques, together with structural
elements (Nodes of Navigational
Model)

12. Lourdes Moreno, “Integrating HCI in a Web Accessibility engineering approach”, Universidad Carlos III de
Conclusions
 To follow accessibility standards does not guarantee complete
accessible web applications
 Difficulties in web application development due to not consider
accessibility together with user interaction
 To integrate of usability techniques by following a UCD and
Inclusive Design in the development process
 This approach allows us to be closer to the user in software design
 The objective of these usability techniques is to facilitate the
contents to be included in the web application when defining
information architecture of the web and presentation into web
interface

13. “Integrating HCI in a Web Accessibility engineering approach”
Lourdes Moreno
lmoreno@inf.uc3m.es
Thank you for your attention