Managing universal accessibility requirements in software-intensive projects

This article presents a reference framework and a consolidated overview of techniques aiming to advance universal access project management practices during the design and development of interactive software. The perspective adopted is that universal accessibility is a nonfunctional quality attribute, and as such, it requires suitable process-oriented support ‘sensitive’ to the technical issues involved. Consequently, a frame of reference for managing universal accessibility in interactive software development projects is described in terms of a generic and configurable development process and a collection of methods addressing specific technical targets across the various stages of the proposed process. The proposed process builds upon the scenario-based perspective on systems development and unfolds stages involved in generating and articulating scenarios from quality attributes relevant to universal accessibility. The techniques presented cover a wide range of technical targets from requirements engineering for universal accessibility to design representations, platform integration, user interface prototyping and evaluation. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.