Enabling Accessibility Characteristics in the Web Services Domain

Accessibility in ICT and web-based applications has become an issue of great importance during the last years. However, the notion of accessibility was until recently undervalued in the web services domain. Trying to fill this gap, this paper presents work conducted towards enabling web services (WS) with accessibility characteristics, trying to ensure that HCI through applications utilizing them is accessible. For this purpose, a WS accessibility assessment framework has been deployed, having as basis guidelines which if followed, can ensure that accessible WSs are developed. In order to further facilitate the development of accessible WSs, a WS accessibility assessment tool has been developed on the basis of the proposed framework. In its current implementation, the tool is capable to automatically assess whether SOAP- or REST- based services conform to proposed guidelines. Thus, by using this tool, developers can be significantly facilitated towards developing accessible web services, or also enriching their already developed not-accessible ones with accessibility characteristics and so as to make them accessible.