Embracing an inclusive mindset within museums is necessary to further accessibility and transform the role of museums in a changing society to more effectively foster diversity. A brief overview of the history of laws related to people with disabilities and the role of centralized museum associations sets accessibility as a concept within cultural and social structures, and is followed by three case studies that reveal how social norms and attitudes must first change before museum policies and procedures related to accessibility can be implemented effectively. These comparisons show remarkable common ground between institutions on both sides of the Atlantic and across the United States despite significant political and cultural differences. The dialogue presented here can only be a start for a further transatlantic exchange of how to move beyond inclusion as a “box to be ticked” to incorporating it as a fundamental asset in the conception of museum work in the twenty-first century.
Since the 1990s, accessibility of Web applications plays an important role in the development of technology. Meanwhile, a Web application requires a complex software development process with analysis, specification and design activities. Successful implementation of accessible user interfaces is based on their integra-tion into early analysis and design activities. Since current accessibility guidelines address only runtime behavior, additional efforts are required to transform and integrate the requirements into analysis and design of Web applications.
This research work investigates the requirements of accessibility for the user as well as the requirements of Web application design. A software process model for Web applications is defined that helps software architects and developers to meet the requirements of accessibility during analysis and design activities. The approach combines usage-centered design with model-driven development to bridge the gap between user and developer. The investigation starts with the analysis of accessible human-computer interaction and the state of the art in development of accessible Web applications. User’s tasks and workflow are taken as a starting point for user interface (UI) design based on the universal design paradigm. Current guidelines for accessible user interface behavior are refined for modeling. The relationship between software architecture and acces-sibility is examined to include complementary aspects of the software develop-ment process. The resulting software development process integrates the requi-rements of accessible interaction in early development activities.
After investigating the Human-computer interaction (HCI) and software ar-chitecture for accessibility, a model-driven design approach for Web-based UI design is presented which overlaps the essential models in HCI including the task, dialog and presentation model. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is used as a meta model and for notation. An additional chapter examines alterna-tive access to UML diagrams. Pre-implementation accessibility evaluation is investigated based on rapid prototyping and model-driven tests. As a case study, the concept is used and tested for an accessible Web interface in data and in-formation integration. The combination of usage-centered and model-driven design supports user’s needs for accessible interaction as well as the integration into modern Web application development. To follow commons conditions of recent Web development, standard UI software architecture and a reference framework for model-driven UI design are used. Finally, the research work is completed with the transfer of the process model to other domains of applicati-on with focus on multiplatform-development.
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