Managing universal accessibility requirements in software‐intensive projects

This article presents a reference framework and a consolidated overview of techniques aiming to advance universal access project management practices during the design and development of interactive software. The perspective adopted is that universal accessibility is a nonfunctional quality attribute, and as such, it requires suitable process‐oriented support ‘sensitive’ to the technical issues involved. Consequently, a frame of reference for managing universal accessibility in interactive software development projects is described in terms of a generic and configurable development process and a collection of methods addressing specific technical targets across the various stages of the proposed process. The proposed process builds upon the scenario‐based perspective on systems development and unfolds stages involved in generating and articulating scenarios from quality attributes relevant to universal accessibility. The techniques presented cover a wide range of technical targets from requirements engineering for universal accessibility to design representations, platform integration, user interface prototyping and evaluation.