Easing Web Guidelines Specification Barbara Leporini, Fabio Paternò, Antonio Scorcia ISTI - CNR Via G. Moruzzi, 1 - 56124, Pisa {barbara.leporini; fabio.paterno; antonio.scorcia}@isti.cnr.it Abstract. More and more accessibility and usability guidelines are being proposed, especially for Web applications. Developers and designers are experiencing an increasing need for tools able to provide them with flexible support in selecting, editing, handling and checking guidelines. In this paper, we present an environment for addressing such issues. In particular, an interactive editor has been designed to assist designers and evaluators in abstracting and specifying new and existing guidelines in an XML-based Guideline Abstraction Language (GAL). Our tool has been designed in such a way to be able to check any guidelines specified in this language without requiring further changes in the tool implementation. Keywords: Guidelines, editor, abstraction language, accessibility, usability. 1. INTRODUCTION Design guidelines are increasingly applied in order to improve Web user interfaces and make them consistent, in particular to attain better accessibility and usability. Indeed, several guidelines have been proposed in the literature for general user interfaces (e.g., [10]) as well as for Web interfaces (e.g. [5, 9, 12]). Thus, in order to assure a certain level of accessibility and usability, developers have to orient themselves among several sets of guidelines. In order to support designers in checking guidelines, a number of automatic tools have been made available on the market, such as Bobby, now called WebXACT [14], Web ATRC [13], Lift [8], and so on. However, such tools have several limitations. For example, they only support the assessment of a fixed set of guidelines. In order to overcome such limitations, we have investigated new solutions for more flexible support [7]. To this end, we have designed and implemented an environment, MAGENTA (Multi-Analysis of Guidelines by an ENhanced Tool for Accessibility) which is a tool that supports the inspection-based evaluation of accessibility and usability guidelines. One of its main features is that it is guideline-independent. In fact, our tool has been developed considering the limitations of most current tools, in which the guidelines supported are specified in the tool implementation, with a certain