Towards an Engineering Process for Developing Accessible Software in Small Software Enterprises

This study presents the results of a web accessibility evaluation performed on a sample of six software products developed by small software enterprises of two countries. According to the International Standard Organization (ISO), an enterprise, organization, department or project with up to 25 people is considered small. All the products evaluated presented accessibility issues, mainly lack of HTML labels, alternative texts, and color contrast errors. These results showed there is a need in small software enterprises of an engineering development process that, taking into account their constraints of staff and budget, includes activities for improving the accessibility of their software. We present the current state of an ongoing work to define such process based on ISO/IEC 29110 that includes accessibility-related task in each of the following activities: initiation, analysis, design, construction, integration and test, and delivery.