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Description
WUAnet (Web Usability and Accessibility Network) is an ISWE initiative started with the aim of providing usability and accessibility solutions to the industry coming from the Web Engineering field. The main research focus is to integrate usability and accessibility into the whole Web development lifecycle. This leads us to identify and understand the user needs and plan for how to integrate those needs into specific Web development processes. An issue of particular importance is when and how the usability and accessibility problems should be fixed. To accomplish these goals, the effectiveness of existing approaches (e.g., review guidelines, evaluation methods, standards, tools) for Web usability and accessibility evaluation will be reviewed and compared. The identification of gaps in the current practices will drive the definition of novel approaches for ensuring usability and accessibility into Web processes. This will contribute to the creation of a body of knowledge about usability and accessibility in Web Engineering. Our ultimate goal is to transfer this knowledge to the Web development industry.
Mission
The main objective of the WUAnet is to improve current practices, methods and tools for the evaluation and early-repair of usability and accessibility defects of Web applications.
Goals
- Systematic review of usability/accessibility evaluation methods. The objective is to perform a systematic review on usability and accessibillity evaluation, based on the expertise, experiences, and research works of the activity members. Each of the methods of interest will be analysed in terms of a selected set of relevant attributes.
- Conduction of Empirical Studies. The objective is to define effective strategies to compare usability/accessibility evaluation methods and tools.
- Integration of usability and accessibility into Web development processes. The objective is to define techniques for gathering user needs, integrating usability/accessibility evaluation activities in different phases of Web development, and reparing the identified usability/accessibility defects. One particular issue to be investigated is the integration of usability/accessibility into model-driven Web development processes.
- Formalize usability and accessibility in terms of machine understandable expressions. The objective is to redefine usability and accessibility stardards in order to have a machine understandable representation of those conditions. Such formalized expressions should minimize the actual ambiguity or subjectivity of current recommendations and standards and provide a consensus framework for evaluation tools.
- Provide solutions for the development of Mobile Web sites. The objective of this goal is to provide solutions for Web developers so that they can develop Web sites suitable for the Mobile Web and for the .mobi domain.
- Definition of requirements patterns for usability and accessibility. The objective is the formulation of requirements patterns on the field of Web Engineering focusing on usability and accessibility issues. These patterns are expected to drive the requirements elicitation process concerning these two characteristics and also to provide a uniform documentation style.
Work in progress
Discussion (members only)
Events
Conferences and workshops
- IWWUA 2007 in Nancy, France
- IWWUA 2008 in Auckland, New Zealand
- ICWE 2008 in Yorktown Heights, New York, USA
- WWW 2008 in Beijing, China
Next meeting
Members
Activity leads
- Silvia Abrahao, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain
- Vicente Luque Centeno, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Members
