Introducing AccessOnto: Ontology for Accessibility Requirements Specification

Abstract

This paper introduces AccessOnto, an ontology-based toolkit for accessibility requirements specification primarily designed to provide a repository of accessibility guidelines and plus a specification language intended to help software developers to incorporate accessibility requirements in their user requirements document. Currently specification of accessibility requirements is largely based on the use of checklists and checkpoints from guidelines such as those prescribed by the World Wide Web Consortiumpsilas Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) or industry leaders such as IBM, Microsoft and Apple amongst others. Most of the guidelines are driven by or directly reflect disability legislation such as the UK's Disability Discrimination Act (1995; 2005) and the USApsilas Americans with Disabilities Act (1990). Most checklists are supported by evaluation toolkits (mainly web page evaluation kits) that check accessibility requirements against each checkpoint. AccessOnto provides a framework for integrating these initiatives into the requirements specification. The rationalisation for AccessOnto is published in Masuwa-Morgan and Burrell.