Introducing AccessOnto: Ontology for Accessibility Requirements Specification

This paper introduces AccessOnto, an ontology-based toolkit for accessibility, requirements specification primarily, designed to provide a repository, of accessibility guidelines and phis a specification language intended to help software developers to incorporate accessibility requirements in their user requirements document. Currently specification of accessibility requirements is largely based on the use of checklists and check-points from guidelines such us those prescribed by the World Wide Web (Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) or industry, leaders such as IBM, Microsoft and Apple amongst others. Most of the guidelines are driven v or directly reflect disability legislation such us the UK's Disability, Discrimination Act (1995; 2005) and the USA's Americans with Disabilities Act (1990). Most checklists are supported by evaluation toolkits (mainly web page evaluation kits) that check accessibility requirements against each checkpoint. Accessonto provides a framework for integrating these initiatives into the requirements specification. The rationalisation fir AccessOnto is published in Masuwa-Morgan and Burrell [4].