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GUIDELINES: WHAT FOR?

In general, a guideline is defined as "a rule or principle that provides guidance to appropriate behavior". Design guidelines have been increasingly proposed to improve user interfaces and make them more consistent. In this view, several usability and accessibility guidelines have been created for general user interfaces as well as for Web interfaces.
There are various organizations that issue standard guidelines on accessibility, some are international, such as W3C/WAI (WCAG 1.0), and others are national, such as the section 508 . Often they share the same body of knowledge but with slight differences, which have to be considered by the designers in specific contexts.

Unfortunately, the available accessibility guidelines do not necessarily guarantee usable web sites, in particular when specific groups of disabled users are considered. Indeed, being able to access information is not enough. In fact, a service may be accessible but not sufficiently usable to certain category of special users (such as the blind).
The disappointing consequence is that not only the developers has to move through an intricate combination of guideline sets for accessibility, but that accessibility alone (without usability) does not guarantee actual information availability.

Thus, there was the necessity to give an exact definition of web site usability for special users (through a set of criteria), to express accessibility and usability guidelines in an abstract language, and, consequently, to create a tool independent by guideline specification.

GOALS

Our research aims to identify an appropriate method to overcome all the possible barriers that prevent the usage of online services by blind and low-vision users. Such a method aims at establishing criteria for an appropriate design and adequate evaluation of Web sites in order to make online services more available for vision-impaired users and to bridge the gap between visual layout and aural perception. To this end, we considered various design principles and identified a set of criteria to define and improve Web site usability, especially when the web pages are accessed by visually impaired users with special devices (i.e. screen reader and magnifiers). Of course, the eventual integration of accessibility and usability principles can make Web site navigation much easier for visually impaired people (VIP).

TOWARD A SOLUTION

Although being considered major issues in Web navigation, usability and accessibility for VIP would remain abstract concepts without specific tools supporting their implementation.
In order to support developers during the evaluation and repair process, we have developed a semi-automatic tool, MAUVE (Multiguideline Accessibility and Usability Validation Enviroment), which supports various sets of guidelines. One of its mean feature is to be independent by the specification of the guidelines. This means that if the guidelines are expressed by an abstract language and are stored in external files the tool can check any of them without the necessity of modifying its implementation.