Web composition with WCAG in mind

Abstract

Accessibility should be a part of the Web design process instead of being a post-design repair process. Thus, it should be more integrated within the internal authoring tools' mechanism of generating new accessible Web contents. Web pages are usually composed of small pieces of HTML code which, dynamically nested and combined, generate full Web pages. This Web composition, specially when creating Web pages from data extracted from heterogeneous or external sources, should have accessibility into account in order to guarantee that the final page being constructed is accessible. This paper presents the set of rules that, in a Web composition process, a design tool must follow in order to create accessible Web pages. These rules are formalized with W3C standards like XPath and XQuery expressions. We also present WSLS as an accessibility enabled authoring tool that makes this task feasible, and focus in how this tool incorporates accessibility into the process of generating new Web contents.

Engineering Accessible Web Applications. An Aspect-Oriented Approach

“…The work by Centeno et al [5] presents the set of rules that, in a Web composition process, a design tool must follow in order to create accessible Web pages. These rules are formalized with W3C standards like XPath 5 and XQuery 6 expressions, defining conditions to be met in order to guarantee that Accessible chunks of Web pages are safely composed into a page that also turns out to be Accessible.…”

A web accessibility assessment on the Texas public school system

“…Rosmaita [30] offered an ''accessibility first'' approach to web design; he proposed an accessibility first pedagogy for web design. Centeno et al [11] also argued that web accessibility needed to be included in the design process rather than be a post-design process. They also showed that designers cannot rely solely on authoring and design tools.…”

“…Studies by Centeno et al [11] and Law et al [23] showed that accessibility is part of the web design process. Thus, the district webmaster must be part of the committee early on.…”

A Workflow-Driven Approach for the Efficient Integration of Web Services in Portals

“…With regard to Web pages composed of autonomous components, enforcing and verifying quality guidelines at development time is rather sophisticated. Regarding for example accessibility aspects, this is due to the fact that the composition of components which are themselves accessible is not necessarily accessible [11].…”