M. Weske, M.-S. Hacid, C. Godart (Eds.): WISE 2007 Workshops, LNCS 4832, pp. 423–428, 2007. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007 Inclusive Usability Techniques in Requirements Analysis of Accessible Web Applications Lourdes Moreno, Paloma Martínez, and Belén Ruiz Computer Science Department, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Madrid, Spain {lmoreno,pmf,bruiz}@inf.uc3m.es Abstract. To follow accessibility standards does not guarantee complete accessible web applications. There are difficulties in web application development due to not consider accessibility in software life cycle together to forget important aspects in user interaction. A proposal to evaluate the benefits of using usability techniques with inclusion in the analysis phase of a web application development is presented. Keywords: Accessibility, Software Engineering, Inclusive Design. 1 Introduction The vertiginous growth in the use of Internet with more and more people using the Web makes necessary an advance of technology devoted to avoiding the exclusion of user groups. Due to the fact that not everyone has access to the Web in the same way, it is necessary to take into account this diversity to provide full accessibility to the Web contents. Designers usually find difficulties in the design of accessible web pages because of scarce and inadequate methodologies and tools. The majority of the these tools aren’t integrated in the development software but are designed to be used a posteriori, in evaluation phase, when detecting barriers increments costs, need of resources and sometimes it is even impossible to achieve a solution. It is necessary to include this in the cycle of process development, from its conception to the launch phase. Also if a technical approach based on meeting accessibility standards regarding web code is followed, it has the inconvenience of going away from the users experience and therefore questions of the interaction of the Web with important users and the access to it could go unnoticed. All of this leads to the necessity on integrating usability and accessibility in software processes following a User Centered Design (UCD) using usability techniques. The UCD [1] focuses on the idea of fulfilling user needs in every phase of the development process. It considers the following phases: analysis, design- prototype- iterative evaluation, implementation and maintenance. This iterative process allows evaluating the design during the development cycle and not only to evaluate the web page in its final stage.