Acronym: ACCESSIBLE
Project Title: Accessibility Assessment Simulation Environment for New Applications Design and Development
Duration: 36 months (01/09/2008- 29/02/2012)

Description: Accessibility is an urgent issue nowadays. Authorities and experts are putting a lot of effort on pushing forward accessibility of software applications but, despite this fact, ICT applications and systems are not fully accessible yet. The triggering idea behind ACCESSIBLE is to contribute for better accessibility for all citizens, to increase the use of standards, and to develop an assessment simulation environment (including a suite of accessibility analysing tools as well as developer-aid tools) to assess efficiently, easily and rapidly the accessibility and viability of software applications for all user groups.

ACCESSIBLE will exploit the technologies behind the recent expansion of accessibility tools and standardisation methodologies, in order to provide an integrated simulation assessment environment for supporting the production of accessible software applications mobile or not.

This will enable large organisations, SMEs or individuals (developers, designers, etc.) to produce software products of superior accessibility and quality, accompanied with appropriate measures and proposals for best practice. The proposed system will be demonstrated in the four pilots of ACCESSIBLE for the assessment of: a) Mobile applications (including JavaFX Scripts), b) Web applications, c) Web services (mainly focusing on infomobility services), and d) description languages (e.g. UML, SDL, etc.).

Objectives: ACCESSIBLE main objectives were to:

• To research and develop an Assessment Simulation module by collating and merging different methodological tools, checking the coherence with the W3C and other main standardisation works, in order to fully support and incorporate accessibility approaches for the design and development of accessible new applications.
• To research and develop for the first time reliable and harmonised methodological approaches and tools for large-scale assessment accessibility of applications and services. A harmonised Accessibility methodological framework (HAM) will be implemented which can be incorporated to a multilayer ontology based knowledge Resource. Thus, ACCESSIBLE will introduce for the first time a complete ontological framework (extending the ASK-IT project ontological framework) for assessing new multi-domain applications in terms of accessibility. Based on this methodology, ACCESSIBLE will provide designers / developers / testers with appropriate designer-aid and accessibility assessment tools to drive design for people with disabilities and to develop accessible software applications.
• To implement a developer/designer-aid framework in order to involve appropriate accessibility standards and methodologies within software development processes.
• To present the accessibility evaluation results through the implementation of an EARL based Reporting module in order to export results in a form helpful to potential receivers of test results, including designers, developers and business stakeholders.
• To construct prototype tests and full demonstrations, in order to evaluate the proposed system by using four specific pilot applications a) accessibility assessment of Web applications and services, b) accessibility assessment of mobile applications (including JavaFX Script applications), c) accessibility assessment of infomobility services and d) accessibility assessment of standard description languages (e.g UML, SDL, etc.).

HIT key role and responsibilities: In ACCESSIBLE, CERTH/HIT had the following responsibilities:

• Technical Manager
• Design and development of the Harmonised Methodology

Contact person:
Eleni Chalkia
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Dr. Evangelos Bekiaris
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+30 2310 498 453 & +30 211 1069 599