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Widgets are part of many web applications and implement distinct interaction mechanisms, in reusable user interface components. However, implementing accessible widgets is a challenge, associated to different factors highlighted in the state-of-the-art, such as: lack of developers knowledge of accessibility guidelines, organization support and tools that support accessible development. This paper reports an investigation on JavaScript source-code complexity impacts of implementing accessibility requirements in widgets. We investigated Dialog, Drop-down menu and Tab widgets of 27 open-source JavaScript libraries. The results showed that widget software artifacts reported an increased average of source-code complexity when implementing accessibility requirements. Results also showed that using DOM-oriented JavaScript libraries (eg. jQuery) significantly increased source-code complexity of widgets. Nevertheless, when using Declarative Component-based JavaScript libraries, no significant difference in source-code complexity was observed. These results suggest that using Declarative Component-based widget libraries might reduce maintainability costs of JavaScript front-end projects.

Mobile devices have become popular, and their use for daily activities has spread around the world. A wide variety of mobile applications aims to meet the daily needs of diverse people, such as transportation and commerce. Meanwhile, mobile accessibility is a worldwide concern. Accessibility is a requirement for any user to interact with software. For example, about 25% of the Brazilian population declares themselves as having some disability. Although traditional mobile software development approaches indicate that native development achieves higher computing performances, this implies high-priced development, difficult maintainability, and low accessibility for the interface components. Many mobile applications still lack accessibility, and people with disabilities may find barriers when interacting with them. We understand that Model-Driven Development (MDD) and cross-platform mobile development, together, may help to solve this gap and facilitate the development of more accessible mobile applications. Our goal is to create an MDD solution that generates accessible mobile applications. We place our focus on blind and low vision users to direct the development of our solution. In this work, we investigate MDD approaches for mobile development and appoint recommendations for accessibility in the user interface components. To achieve this goal, we developed AccessMDD, an approach to stimulate developers´ awareness of accessibility recommendations. This approach supports the inclusion of accessibility requirements and generates accessible user interfaces for mobile apps.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a relevant topic of interest in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) since it makes feasible a future computing scenario that can change the way people experiment and use technology. IoT is a new paradigm in which intelligent objects equipped with sensors, networks, and processing technologies integrate and work together to provide smart services to users. In the face of the rapid growth in the number of connected devices in an IoT scenario, the perspective of a smarter world could be actual. However, it is still too far away due to challenges related to human interaction. To help understand the issues involved in building experiences with multiple devices, we conducted interviews with ten companies exploring the characteristics and challenges surrounding the IoT project to designing IoT technologies. The results identified a set of qualitative data from companies that are developing IoT projects allowing us to discuss future directions for research. Our main contribution is related to the identification of important aspects of IoT that impact the design of user-friendly solutions. We conclude pointing to the need for IoT design that takes into account the users' particularities.

The web has provided users with interactivity through Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). However, due to the dynamic nature of RIAs, most applications still do not implement accessible solutions in their components for a variety of reasons, such as the lack of specialized knowledge by developers. Besides, there is a lack of tools capable of performing an automatic evaluation for accessibility in RIAs. To automatically evaluate accessibility in RIAs, tools mainly require the identification of the dynamic components. In this paper, we propose a solution that aims to automatically identify widgets in RIAs, by simulating interactions of a real user with a web application, through all the possible events their elements can receive. The developed mechanism extracts the properties of the dynamic elements to compose a database to guide the classification of specific widgets. We evaluated the potential of the mechanism, by applying it with different implementations of a particular widget, the Calendar. Also, the mechanism was tested in a controlled environment to verify more accurately the changes that occur on a web page, which could precisely identify the widgets as Calendars.

Instead of designing for accessibility from the start of a software development project, a common procedure is to consider a substantial group of potential users only when the artifact is almost completed. In particular, the domain of accessible cross-platform mobile apps has only received limited attention by research and practitioners. In this work, we set out to tackle mobile accessibility by identifying distinctive challenges, requirements, and solution techniques for mobile apps in contrast to established web development. Furthermore, a model-driven approach that integrates accessibility concerns into the development of cross-platform mobile apps is presented. To highlight the applicability of the proposed approach, parts of mobile prototypes accessible to visually impaired people were built based on the enhanced MD2 framework.

Population aging on a global scale has occurred simultaneously with rapid technological developments. In the context of using technologies to improve quality of life, digital games can offer several benefits for a healthy aging, such as physical and mental well-being, and socializing with other players. However, to achieve such benefits it is required that the interfaces of these games be accessible to the elderly public. In this way, it was noted the need for evaluation methods that consider the characteristics of elderly users while interacting with games. In Literature, there is a scarcity of methods that evaluate digital games, so, the objective of this work is to propose a specialization of the Cognitive Walkthrough (CW) method to evaluate digital games considering elderly users. Two case studies were also carried out, the first with the intention of verifying in practice how the CW method is applied. Based on the theoretical studies and the results of the first case study, a specialization of the CW method was proposed, called Cognitive Barriers Walkthrough (CBW). A second case study was carried out to verify its applicability and provide a comparison with the traditional method. The comparison results suggest the effectiveness of the proposed method over the traditional method.

Mobile game applications stand as a profitable market, being mostly represented by independent startups striving to overcome their lack of experience. One of their big challenges refers to the adoption of mobile games by older adults. Appropriated methods for usability, accessibility and user experience (UX) evaluation of such domain remains a few in the literature. Engineering methods are still required for startup companies to overcome the challenge. In this paper, we sought to build evaluation methods for the context of startups, mobile games and older adults. This study is an empirical research based on techniques from the constructivist grounded theory methodology. Our findings show a lean framework aiming to guide startup practitioners to diagnose usability, accessibility and UX issues from tests of mobile games with older adults. We also provide a guide to usability and accessibility heuristics that can be employed to inspect the domain.

Over the past decade, the Web has provided users with interactivity through Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). However, most applications still have not implemented accessible solutions in their components. Apart from the high level of difficulty of manual assessments of accessibility in RIAs, such applications lack automatic tools that support the process. The dynamic nature of web content leads to the updating of automated tools to include techniques that identify and classify the several components that comprise RIAs. This paper discusses the state-of-the-art and limitations of current automatic tools that assess the accessibility of RIAs, and presents a meta-review of multidisciplinary techniques towards motivating research on improvements in such tools. The study contributes to the availability of accessible RIAs for disabled users, which include components with recent technologies and innovative features in web interfaces.

Smart toys are new to the Internet of Things market, and its connectivity to the cloud have raised concerns about children's privacy. Parents and legal guardians have striven to protect the privacy of their owns. However, current approaches for privacy control still lack usability for lay people. In this paper, we have explored the use of Card Sorting to enhance the usability of a privacy control for smart toys. Our goal was to identify and describe benefits of this technique to the design of more usable privacy controls. For this reason, we conducted a case study with voluntarily participants. We chose a parental control model from the literature to be the subject of evaluation for the experiment. Therefore, we extracted 19 units of information from its interface, and put them into cards for the Card Sorting evaluation. After the experiment, we obtained 30 valid responses. From these responses we performed a cluster analysis to understand the best alternative to group privacy related contents. Our contributions include a new model for nutrition label style mobile parental privacy controls for smart toys, suggestion of Google Material Design icons to be applied as indication for groups of privacy policies and, finally, a six steps process to perform Card Sorting with cluster analysis that does not rely on users' discussions to compose the Information Architecture hierarchy.

Since Web 2.0, web developers have increased the use of more sophisticated interaction mechanisms and visual effects, called widgets, to design the Rich Internet Applications' (RIA) user interface. However, many of the widgets currently available on websites do not implement accessibility design solutions standardized in the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) specification and hence they are not accessible to disabled people. This paper come up with an approach for automatically classifying dropdown menu widgets and their subcomponents using a machine learning pipeline which analyses mutations that occur in RIAs' Document Object Model (DOM) structure, triggered by users interactions or visual effects. Classifying widgets and their subcomponents is an essential step for automatic evaluation of ARIA conformance and HTML code adaptation to mitigate accessibility issues. Thus, we also aim to take steps toward easing the software engineering process of RIAs in conformance with ARIA specifications. To validate, was conducted a case study with real websites to evaluate the proposed machine learning pipeline. The results provide evidences that our approach is capable of classifying dropdown menu widgets and their subcomponents with 0.91 F-measure in average.

The Web presents an extensive information content available to diverse people, with different abilities and needs. For this reason, the evaluation for the universal accessibility and the usability are difficult tasks, even though having automatic tools to support them. In this context, it is also observed that the relationship between usability attributes and accessibility is too little explicitly considered, consisting of a research issue to be investigated. To support the integrated evaluation of accessibility and usability criteria, it was developed an environment for analyzing results of accessibility and usability assessments, thus allowing human evaluation, and the inclusion of evaluation results generated by semi-automatic tools, leading the evaluator to produce improvements on both fronts. We performed a case study, in which we observed the difficulties of inexperienced developers related to the description of the guidelines documented by the W3C and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The cost for ensuring the objective criteria was the number of criteria to be checked, which tends to be high, leading to excessive time to review the application, but the experience in considering the concepts related to accessibility and usability, in the same environment, was positive.

A huge amount of content has been made available on the Web. Although there are several initiatives to guide an accessible web development, researchers have showed that web developers are rarely aware of accessibility issues in their web projects. In this paper, we conducted a survey to verify the evolution of web accessibility awareness in Brazil. We have conducted an exploratory study based on web questionnaire, using a self-selected and non-probabilistic sampling method. The study had 404 valid answers, covering all regions of Brazil. The results show that most of participants has never developed an accessible website and 33.2% of them are not worried about considering accessibility in their future projects. Therefore, it is important to create public policies that improve the current web accessibility scenario, raising the awareness of the people involved in web development, as well as obligating compliance with Brazilian legislation.

Several crowdsourcing-based systems have been employed to gather information from individuals in natural disaster domain. They involve a wide diversity of users, which make their usability an important aspect. This article deals with the understanding of users' needs and design of a new interface for the Citizen Observatory of Floods. An User-centered Design (UCD) approach was employed and users were the main focus of the development process. The outcomes of a heuristic evaluation conducted revealed several problems of the prototype regarding usability aspects.

The Web portability is a usually wished feature and, due to the recent dissemination of mobile devices such as smartphones, it motivated the development of methods to adapt web content to many kinds of interfaces. However, an increasing diversity of user profiles can be observed consuming Web resources. The elderly, as part of this diverse group of users, face barriers that hinder their access to applications and Web content in general. This paper presents a web content adaptation strategy for mobile devices, and in particular, the interaction by the elderly with menu Widget, generated by a tool, Adapte-me!, is analysed. A Case Study to evaluate this strategy was produced, and the results demonstrated that participants performed better while using the menu Widget generated by the tool. Furthermore, all participants showed increased satisfaction interacting with the adapted menu Widget, since they all managed to successfully conclude all assigned tasks during the Case Study.

The constant evolution of the Web has enabled that new online services in various segments be offered. Following this evolution, it is crucial that its content allows access to the different user's profiles. Older adults (age 60+) are users who typically have limited capacities due to ageing process and they have encountered difficulties in interacting with websites. Several accessibility and usability issues still have to be solved, despite the legislation and guidelines established for the development of accessible and usable web content. In particular, little attention has been devoted to the difficulties faced by older adults because most websites are not designed with these users in mind. This paper addresses the development of a checklist, a support to web accessibility and usability evaluations for the older adults profile and its validation. The checklist was elaborated from analysis of the state of the art, based on a literature review. During the checklist development we investigated the main barriers faced by older adults in web interaction. We conclude by highlighting the need for more studies on web interaction by older people and proposing new strategies for future research.

Recently the interest in video consumption and sharing has increased considerably. Although initiatives such as WCAG 2.0 set guidelines for video players development, there is still a need for investigation about how to improve accessibility of Web videos for blind and low vision users. To enable researchers and developers new ways of interaction based on 3D gestural interaction, we introduce a JavaScript based framework, called Gesture4All, for Web videos interactions using four sensors (Smartphone, Webcam, Myo, and Leap Motion). Our framework is seamlessly integrated with the interface, receiving and interpreting gesture interactions performed by the user in order to control the Web video player functionalities. In this paper, we present the Gesture4All features as well as details of its architecture, demonstrating how the framework improve the accessibility through a case-study by 20 blind and visually impaired users. We also discuss the results and future works.

This article describes a gestural interaction case study conducted with 36 blind and visually impaired users. Task-based user evaluations were undertaken on three phases to answer the question: Can gesture interactions improve the experience of blind or visually impaired users for Web videos accessibility? After the study case analysis, 97% of the users would use a gestural interface and 92% preferred gesture interaction compared to the usual interaction. To obtain the conclusions, the variables were analyzed by comparisons of percentages and chi-square test.

This short-course aims to present the development of games and gamification elements for researchers and students who wish to analyze the experience with users through data collection - an overview of the development, from the fast creation of games to the resources for the collection of data and storage.

Population ageing represents an opportunity and a challenge for Gerontechnology innovation. The usability should be considered in the design of applications on mobile devices for older users because as we age, cognitive functions begin to decline and older people may have more difficulty to cope with managing a eventfully daily routine, even those experiencing a healthy ageing process. Thus, the opportunities that may be brought by the use of smartphones and solutions for the daily difficulties are still in demand. Therefore, co-design and focus on preferences and needs are necessary in order to make applications for mobile devices really accessible to older users. From data collected in a previous study, the authors developed a note-taking application with older user centered design for aid routine management. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the use by older users of this note-taking application, named ElderNote. The study involved a sample of 21 Brazilian older users of tablets and smartphones. Results showed that the reminder app designed for an older audience is accessible and have good usability, according to the performance of the older users' participants.

Despite potential for preventing social isolation and loneliness, providing health care access and other benefits, older persons tend to be less receptive to digital devices. Elderly people frequently appoint complex interface and perceived usefulness as cause for not using health-related ICT. There is little information about preferences and interests of this specific population for tailored and customized technology, but according to the current literature; older users and caregivers both think that accessible and interactive design is the main aspiration. Besides that, they consider important some functionalities, especially for social interactions purposes. This study was conducted to address the interest, preferences and problems with an application for personalizing the tablet; with health older adults and social networking of dependent elderly individuals and to propose a new design for it. After using a skin app prototype, the 35 volunteers from 3 groups (independent older adults, informal and for- mal caregivers) were interviewed in order to suggest changes and help us to propose a new design for an Android skin. The main findings were analyzed according to interface and functionalities preferences in order to develop the concept to a new application. The prototype is called ANNI, available at Google Play Store.

Popularity of Internet applications has reached significant scales. In consequence, a wide diversity of solutions has been created based on Web features. Rich Internet Application (RIA) is a relevant term adopted for technological advances in software developed for the Web, which refers to Web applications aimed to provide users with a desktop similar experience. RIAs usually have wider capabilities in comparison with traditional hypertext applications, specially regarding to the interactive elements of their interfaces. New possibilities that have emerged from RIA are essential to support relevant aspects of Web 2.0, such as participation and collaboration. As among other applications, developing accessible and usable RIAs is a valuable and fundamental aspect for development teams, since these new interaction features available on the Web are not always accessible for people with disabilities or reduced mobility. For this reason, this mini-course aims to present the main concepts usually used to evaluate accessibility and usability of RIA; it is an overview of perspectives about practices and theoretical references, from Standards for Quality up to the implementation resources of Web applications. The approach of this mini-course covered practices on main RIA coding techniques, and methods of usability and accessibility evaluation as Guidelines Review and Heuristic Evaluation. Moreover, this mini-course was developed aiming newcomers and professionals that want to specialize their skills on the development and evaluation of usable and accessible RIAs.

This paper presents the results concerning an update of a previous mapping study about usability heuristics applied in Heuristic Evaluation of mobile usability. Heuristic Evaluation is a popular method of usability evaluation, and its applicability to inspect the mobile usability may be improved by the development of context and audience specific heuristics. Additionally to a previous mapping, we present analysis of the recent usage of context and audience specific heuristics, and the application of Heuristic Evaluation to evaluate multiple contexts and audiences. The results showed the use of specific heuristics for the Healthy context and Malaysian audience. In addition, the results turned out the evolving of Heuristic Evaluation for multiple contexts and audiences, such as: Health Sector, Games, Learning, Elderly and Accessibility.

The role of small and medium enterprises (SME), especially small businesses, has significantly increased in the developing of interactive applications. Given the relevance of these companies in the market, the adoption of usability and user experience (UX) practices in these organizations is fundamental for the improvement of interactive systems. This paper performed a survey with 26 Brazilian small businesses of software about their Usability and UX practices. The results showed that Usability Tests and Heuristic Evaluation were the evaluation methods most frequently reported to be used by the surveyed companies. Although the results suggest an improvement in the adoption of usability and UX practices, they also show the need for significant improvement in training and awareness of the importance of usability and UX and appropriating techniques and practices in the context of small businesses. Our results showed a low use of accessibility evaluation methods, such as tests with disabled users (no mention) or even the use of automated tools to check initial aspects of accessibility (mentioned by only 3.85% of respondents) by the companies surveyed. It also showed that the companies surveyed relies many times on professionals of low experience for the conduction of Usability Tests and Heuristic Evaluation.

Drop-down Menus are JavaScript/CSS based Widget implementations which frequently represent the main navigation mechanism of a web application. These Widgets are used to display sub-level navigation links which are presented only as users position the mouse over the Widget. However many of the Widgets available on theWeb do not implement Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) requirements which address how to make these Widgets accessible. This paper presents an automatic approach for identifying these Drop-down Menu Widgets in web applications. The automatic identification of these Widgets works towards the implementation of ARIA automatic evaluation tools to assist web developers while developing accessible Widgets. The proposed approach was implemented in a tool called aria-check-menus which is open-source available. The tool was evaluated through a case study and the results showed evidences that the proposed approach is capable of automatically identifying Drop-down Menu Widgets in web applications, having correctly identified 146 Drop-down Menus Widgets in high traffic websites with 0.77 precision and 0.90 recall in average. Henceforth, the tool could be used in an automatic ARIA evaluation tool to support web developers in the implementation of accessible Drop-down menu Widgets.

Web pages are composed of elements, such as menus that are responsible for assisting navigation on the website. However, many of the menus are not developed properly, which creates accessibility barriers and hinders access to the contents. This paper aims to present a method for creating accessible menus. Initially, we studied the different types of menus and the accessibility guidelines involving the creation of accessible menus. From the studies, we developed a meta-model that gave rise to AMenu language, where we included all the technical details regarding to accessibility. Then, we developed the AMeG tool to facilitate the use of language. Finally, we conducted a case study with developers, in order to verify the feasibility of the approach, arguing its efficiency and limitations. The results indicate a reduction in efforts to develop accessible web menus, since developers do not have to deal with technical details of accessibility.

Nowadays, the Web represents the main way of providing computing services to a huge variety of users with different characteristics. Thus, accessibility and usability features become even more critical to a Web application's success. Researchers have been worried in providing mechanisms to serve as guidelines that Web systems should provide, in terms of usability and accessibility requirements. However, there not exists an instrument to provide a measure to help the specialists to verify how much these requirements are presented in a Web system. In this paper, we describe HEUA, a proposed questionnaire to assess the usability and accessibility of existing (or legacy) Web systems, to support measuring how much effort a Web system needs to be improved.

In the Software as a Service (SaaS) distribution model, the software belongs to the service provider and clients act as tenants who pay to use the software. However, sparse documentation and problem-specific solutions imply that building a scalable, secure and configurable Software as a Service is not an easy task. This paper describes a reusable approach for implementing Single Database, Multitenant Software as a Service from existing Web Applications by adding multitenancy as an aspect of the Software. The approach uses architectural components, design patterns and current main-stream programming language functionality without requiring extensive changes to the original Web application. We used our approach to develop both a real-world use case, built in Ruby on Rails, and a reference application, built in Java, which is freely available.

This study presents an investigation on how keyboard accessibility has been delivered in RIA - Rich Internet Applications. We conducted an evaluation on 32 websites which contained Tab Widgets, from the 150 websites of Alexa's top most accessed websites list. The evaluation process consisted of checking if the Widgets implemented ARIA - Accessible Rich Internet Applications requirements, like the use of role/state semantic attributes and presentation of keyboard interaction strategies. The results showed that, even though the ARIA specification achieved the status of W3C Candidate Recommendation in 2011, few websites implemented Tab Widgets according to ARIA in the Web. The study also identified alternative keyboard navigation mechanisms that are accessible to Assistive Technologies users, despite the disadvantages they might represent.

The Web is currently the main way of providing computing services, reaching a larger number of users with different characteristics. As the complexity and interactivity of systems is increased, users become more demanding towards all the requirements associated to their distinct needs. Implementing the interaction requirements in the Web has become the main focus of accessibility and usability studies, describing essential design features which provide users with quality, assured systems. The focus on the users reinforced that as the number of users grows and the system became available to a wide variety of users, accessibility and usability features become even more critical to a Web application's success. In this paper, we present ACCESSA, a practical approach to rapidly improve the accessibility of existing Web systems, acting mainly in the interface design with no changes to the functional requirements of systems. The ACCESSA is based on the WCAG 2.0 guidelines and other patterns, choosing the guidelines that present lower implementation costs and represent higher severity accessibility issues.