The perception of accessibility in Web development by academy, industry and government: a survey of the Brazilian scenario

Accessibility has become a serious issue to be considered by various sectors of the society. However, what are the differences between the perception of accessibility by academy, government and industry? In this paper, we present an analysis of this issue based on a large survey carried out with 613 participants involved with Web development, from all of the 27 Brazilian states. The paper presents results from the data analysis for each sector, along with statistical tests regarding the main different issues related to each of the sectors, such as: government and law, industry and techniques, academy and education. The concern about accessibility law is poor even amongst people from government sector. The analyses have also pointed out that the academy has not been addressing accessibility training accordingly. The knowledge about proper techniques to produce accessible contents is better than other sectors`, but still limited in industry. Stronger investments in training and in the promotion of consciousness about the law may be pointed as the most important tools to help a more effective policy on Web accessibility in Brazil.

Capturing best practices in web development

This paper describes capturing design experiences by applying grounded theory to pattern mining. The presented approach aims at inducing expert development knowledge and its subsequent packaging into domain-specific design patterns, which could later be used by both experienced and novice developers in the field. The method was evaluated empirically in a domain of Web development.

Colour and image issues in web development

This paper describes a small set of patterns that are produced in a process of domain-wide pattern mining. We provide a brief description of the experience mining process across web development domain and explain how the resulting pattern languages were discovered. A subset of the mined patterns was selected for this paper because of their pertinence to most web development projects, i.e. colour scheme and readability issues and images download issue.

Dynamic Web Development with Seaside

Seaside is the open source framework of choice for developing sophisticated and dynamic web applications. Seaside uses the power of objects to master the web. With Seaside web applications is as simple as building desktop applications. Seaside lets you build highly dynamic and interactive web applications. Seaside supports agile development through interactive debugging and unit testing. Seaside is based on Smalltalk, a proven and robust language implemented by different vendors. Seaside is now available for all the major Smalltalk including Pharo, Squeak, GNU Smalltalk, Cincom Smalltalk, GemStone Smalltalk, and VA Smalltalk.

End-User Development Success Factors and their Application to Composite Web Development Environments

The Future Internet is expected to be composed of a mesh of interoperable Web services accessed from all over the Web. This approach has not yet caught on since global user-service interaction is still an open issue. Successful composite applications rely on heavyweight service orchestration technologies that raise the bar far above end-user skills. The weakness lies in the abstraction of the underlying service front-end architecture rather than the infrastructure technologies themselves. In our opinion, the best approach is to offer end-to-end composition from user interface to service invocation, as well as an understandable abstraction of both building blocks and a visual composition technique. In this paper we formalize our vision with regard to the next-generation front-end Web technology that will enable integrated access to services, contents and things in the Future Internet. We present a novel reference architecture designed to empower non-technical end users to create and share their own self-service composite applications. A tool implementing this architecture has been developed as part of the European FP7 FAST Project and EzWeb Project, allowing us to validate the rationale behind our approach.

Intelligent encoding of concepts in web development retrieval

The main aim of the proposed approach presented in this paper is to improve Web information retrieval effectiveness by overcoming the problems associated with a typical keyword matching retrieval system, through the use of concepts and an intelligent fusion of confidence values. By exploiting the conceptual hierarchy of the WordNet (G. Miller, 1995) knowledge base, we show how to effectively encode the conceptual information in a document using the semantic information implied by the words that appear within it. Rather than treating a word as a string made up of a sequence of characters, we consider a word to represent a concept.

Extending Web Modeling Language to exploit stigmergy : intentionally recording unintentional trails

Software development and Web site development techniques have evolved significantly over the past 20 years. The relatively young Web Application development area has borrowed heavily from traditional software development methodologies primarily due to the similarities in areas of data persistence and User Interface (UI) design. Recent developments in this area propose a new Web Modeling Language (WebML) to facilitate the nuances specific to Web development. WebML is one of a number of implementations designed to enable modeling of web site interaction flows while being extendable to accommodate new features in Web site development into the future. Our research aims to extend WebML with a focus on stigmergy which is a biological term originally used to describe coordination between insects. We see design features in existing Web sites that mimic stigmergic mechanisms as part of the UI. We believe that we can synthesize and embed stigmergy in Web 2.0 sites. This paper focuses on the sub-topic of site UI design and stigmergic mechanism designs required to achieve this.

Rove n Rave™ development : a partnership between the university and the disability service provider to build a social website for people with an intellectual disability

Rove n Rave ™ is a website designed and created for, and with, people with an intellectual disability. Its aim is to provide them with a user-friendly online platform where they can share opinions and experiences, and where they can find reviews which will help them to choose a place to visit themselves. During the development process, input on design requirements was gathered from a group of people with an intellectual disability and the disability service provider. This group then tested the product and provided further feedback on improving the website. It was found that the choice of wording, icons, pictures, colours and some functions significantly affected the users' ability to understand the content of the website. This demonstrated that a partnership between the developer and the user is essential when designing and delivering products or services for people with an intellectual disability.

Requirements engineering for web-based information systems

This chapter overviews the existing methods of requirements analysis as prescribed by some of the best-known web-development methods. It also discusses the pre-eminent importance of stakeholder analysis, identification of stakeholder views and concerns, and the processes governing elicitation of web systems requirements. The chapter finally derives a model of concern-driven requirements evolution from several case studies undertaken in the area of web-enabled employee service systems.

Sharing and reuse of web developers experience

Development of commercial web systems is laborious, lengthy and costly. This is partly due to the fact that the methods of their development can hardly cope with the complexity of provided services. Such services may need to be distributed and collaborative, require sophisticated software architecture, be rich in form, content and interactivity, and have a wide range of potentially casual users. While web development methodologies are slowly emerging from research methodologies, their adoption is far from wide-spread. To improve this situation, the authors propose an approach based on the observed practices of professional web developers, who openly share and reuse their web development experience, while guarding their development workproducts. To this end, we suggest to enhance web development methods, by collecting problem-solving experience of web developers, packaging it into a reusable form, and providing a navigable decision structure assisting developers in identifying proven expert solutions suitable for a given problem context.

Phenomenological inquiry into the experience of web project managers

The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web has been instrumental in bringing about the growth in the implementation of web-based information systems (WBIS). Such systems are designed with the aim of improving productivity, data accuracy, and the reduction of paperwork and administrative overheads. Moreover, unlike their conventional non-web-based predecessors, the WBIS are commonly aimed at users who are casual and untrained, geographically distributed and non-homogenous. The dissemination of WBIS necessitates additional infrastructure support in the form of a security system, workflow and transaction management, and web administration. WBIS are commonly developed using an evolutionary approach, whereby the version of the application, acquired from the vendor, is first deployed as a pilot, in order to gather feedback from the target users before the evolutionary cycles commence. While a number of web development methodologies have been proposed by existing research, there is a dearth of empirical evidence that elucidates the experiences of project initiators in pursuing the evolution of web services, a process that undoubtedly involves dealing with stakeholder issues. This research project presents a phenomenological investigation of the experiences of project managers with the implementation of web-based employee service systems (ESS), a domain that has witnessed a sharp growth in Australia in recent times. However, the project managers’ rich, multidimensional account of their experiences with the implementation of ESS revealed the social obstacles and fragility of intra-organizational relationships that demanded a cautious and tactful approach. Thus, the study provides a socio-organizational perspective to web projects in contrast to the functionalist paradigm of current web development methodologies. The research also confirms that consideration of the concerns of stakeholders by project managers is crucial to the successive cycles of ESS evolution. Project managers address stakeholder concerns by pursuing actions that are aimed at encouraging ESS usage, but at the same time, such actions can have consequences necessitating subsequent iterations of system enhancement and improvement. Finally, the research also discovered that despite the different socio-political climate prevalent in various organizations, in which ESS are being implemented, the experiences of project managers in dealing with stakeholder concerns can be captured and independently confirmed in terms of their perceived relevance and usefulness in problem-solving within the application domain.

Uma perspectiva de extensão do modelo de aceitação de tecnologia para explicar o uso de linguagens de desenvolvimento WEB: pesquisa com desenvolvedores Pyton e Java

The spread of the Web boosted the dissemination of Information Systems (IS) based on the Web. In order to support the implementation of these systems, several technologies came up or evolved with this purpose, namely the programming languages. The Technology Acceptance Model TAM (Davis, 1986) was conceived aiming to evaluate the acceptance/use of information technologies by their users. A lot of studies and many applications have used the TAM, however, in the literature it was not found a mention of the use of such model related to the use of programming languages. This study aims to investigate which factors influence the use of programming languages on the development of Web systems by their developers, applying an extension of the TAM, proposed in this work. To do so, a research was done with Web developers in two Yahoo groups: java-br and python-brasil, where 26 Java questionnaires and 39 Python questionnaires were fully answered. The questionnaire had general questions and questions which measured intrinsic and extrinsic factors of the programming languages, the perceived usefulness, the perceived ease of use, the attitude toward the using and the programming language use. Most of the respondents were men, graduate, between 20 and 30 years old, working in the southeast and south regions. The research was descriptive in the sense of its objectives. Statistical tools, descriptive statistics, main components and linear regression analysis were used for the data analysis. The foremost research results were: Java and Python have machine independence, extensibility, generality and reliability; Java and Python are more used by corporations and international organizations than supported by the government or educational institutions; there are more Java programmers than Python programmers; the perceived usefulness is influenced by the perceived ease of use; the generality and the extensibility are intrinsic factors of programming languages which influence the perceived ease of use; the perceived ease of use influences the attitude toward the using of the programming language

Desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta de autoria de conteúdo para aprendizado via web

A web tem sido bastante utilizada ultimamente por empresas e instituições de ensino como forma de oferecer aprendizado. A criação de conteúdos para o aprendizado via web é uma atividade que tem demandado recursos humanos especializados em tecnologias e conceitos, de forma que os conteúdos criados não sejam restritos a ferramentas, plataformas e formatos de apresentação. Este trabalho apresenta o desenvolvimento de um protótipo de uma ferramenta de autoria de conteúdo para aprendizado via web, através da qual os conteúdos criados são independentes da ferramenta de autoria, da plataforma operacional e dos formatos de apresentação que sejam utilizados. Por ser um trabalho de desenvolvimento, um processo é definido e suas fases e atividades são utilizadas para organizar trabalho e documentar todas as decisões tomadas.