Young developers of digital technologies need to be aware of the principles of inclusive design and accessibility, but it is difficult to teach these concepts in the abstract. Practical simulations of the effects of disability and aging can be engaging for students, but expensive to purchase and are criticised as disrespectful to people with disabilities and older people. We have developed a very low-cost simulation kit and used it in a practical exercise with computer science students, emphasising that this are not the same as being disabled or older, but give some insight into the experience of visually disabled and older people in using digital technologies. The low-cost nature and tasks we designed to undertake with the kit were designed to instil some fun into the exercise. An evaluation with 63 first year undergraduate computer science students yielded positive ratings of the exercise and many interesting comments from the students.

The W3C Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools list compiles over 160 tools that can help check or monitor various accessibility issues on websites and apps, already published or in development. It is one of the most comprehensive and most referenced lists for evaluation tools today. The page was published originally in 2006. This paper describes the re-design of the list to ensure a growing variety of stakeholders, both accessibility experts, novices and others, can find the right tool for their situation in the current day and age.

The re-design included defining the audience, information needs, user-stories, design and layout, comprehensive user and technology oriented filter options, decision support for users, etc. To gather the requirements, the research team conducted contextual inquiries with a large variety of stakeholders including both tool users and vendors. The resulting prototypes were extensively and iteratively tested with the users to further improve upon the design and functionality. During the re-design process, the research group coordinated with the WAI Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) to ensure the design iterations stayed within the W3C/WAI brief and requirements.

The researchers propose new functionality to guide users to relevant accessibility tools, such as a step-by-step search assistant, new updated filter and search functions, and adding relevant and understandable information for each tool. Not everything made it into the final version.

Relevant literature focusing on the accessibility of electronic documents (e.g., PDFs) has been increasing incrementally in recent years. Despite its significance, paradoxically, scientific articles, even those related to accessibility-themed topics, often fail to provide fully accessible content, thus creating a gap between theory and practice. Therefore, we aimed to explore how academic articles on digital accessibility evaluation published in the past ten years comply with established accessibility standards. We performed a tool-based evaluation using Adobe Accessibility Checker and a manual evaluation to inspect the articles comprehensively. The results showed that none of the analyzed accessibility articles were problem-free. They, however, contained recurring, severe accessibility barriers, making it highly challenging for people who rely on screen readers to access information. Also, the evaluated data showed no discernible pattern of changes over the years.

Software accessibility, once relatively unknown, has been recognized as both a socio-technical necessity and a legal requirement, drawing considerable research attention in the field of Computer Science over the years. A wide range of guidelines, methods, techniques, and tools has been developed, accompanied by numerous training and support opportunities. However, practical implementation of accessibility still faces challenges, evident in persistent barriers in many software products. While acknowledging the necessity of including accessibility throughout the engineering process, research on comprehensive approaches has been sparse, primarily focusing on requirements engineering and evaluation, neglecting implementation phase. We see integrating accessibility support into the core of design and development as a crucial step for improvements, revealing a need for integrating accessibility evaluation support into integrated development environments (IDEs). This paper aims to present a collection of approaches, methods and tools that support accessibility involvement within different stages of the engineering process, and additionally to provide a theoretical foundation for research and development of incorporating accessibility evaluation support within IDEs. Thereafter, we analyzed existing related Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) and complemented the findings with a new SLR. The study provides a solid base for advanced approaches in integrating accessibility into SE.

This paper presents a novel approach of making content more accessible and usable by improving adaptability focussing on non-text content. The design and authoring concepts are supported by a software client for authoring and adapted reading. It is based on the requirements of users with disabilities, care providers and educators gathered in a UX/participatory and co-research approach facilitated in a EU-co-funded project aiming at a new level of adaptability in the content/publishing sector, in particular for illustrated children books: Flexi Picture eBook (FPB)

In this paper we present the approaches and functionalities of the authoring and reading software featuring new and innovative approaches for a) mainstreaming better accessibility both for readers with vision as well as learning disabilities in the publishing sector and b) support of authors related to content adaptation, in particular related to non-text content. The key research challenges addressed are at the level of a) conceptualising an efficient way of adapting non-text content to different layers of understanding during the authoring process and b) providing well usable functionalities for incorporating such adaptations into popular accessible digital reading formats such as EPUB3.