Exploring Variability of Visual Accessibility Options in Operating Systems

Abstract

Digital technologies are an opportunity to overcome disabilities, provided that accessibility is ensured. In this paper, we focus on visual accessibility and the way it is supported in Operating Systems (OS). The significant variability in this support has practical consequences, e.g., the difficulty to recommend or select an OS, or migrate from one OS to another. This suggests building a variability model for OS that would classify them and would serve as a reference. We propose a methodology to build such a variability model with the help of the Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) framework. In addition, as visual accessibility can be divided into several concerns (e.g., zoom, or contrast), we leverage an extension of FCA, namely Relational Concept Analysis. We also build an ontology to dispose of a standardized description of visual accessibility options. We apply our proposal to the analysis of the variability of a few representative operating systems.

Relational Concept Analysis in Practice: Capitalizing on Data Modeling Using Design Patterns

“…This approach justifies to build a lattice for each view and one lattice gathering all views. Known Uses This DP has been implemented for the analysis of visual accessibility options in operating systems (OS) in [23]. This analysis had different purposes, including making recommendations to OS developers to design a new version, to assist end-users finding an accessibility configuration close to the current configuration when the OS upgrades, or when end-users have to change OS.…”