Introducing web service accessibility assessment techniques through a unified quality of service context

This paper introduces novel web service (WS) accessibility assessment techniques through a unified Quality of Services (QoS) context. The goal is to enable future QoS-aware service selection systems to select and provide accessible web services, ones that are properly designed so as to allow their consumption from end-user applications, used from people with disabilities. In this line, a WS accessibility assessment Framework (WSaaF) has been developed, on the basis of WS accessibility guidelines, dealing with accessibility issues that can appear both on the presentation level of content delivered through WSs and on the content level itself. The WSaaF and its guidelines follow the rationale behind W3C WCAG 2.0-based accessibility standardization of web content. It provides the basis toward building future accessible WSs, a task that can be further facilitated by the use of an appropriate Tool (WSaaT), developed with the aim to provide automatic assessment of services, against guidelines of the proposed framework. Then, the WS accessibility attribute is introduced, as a metric that can be used in conjunction to ones typically utilized so far, within QoS-aware service selection systems. As a result, a novel unified QoS framework is proposed, incorporating the notion of accessibility in the service selection process. The proposed unified QoS framework can eventually lead to the provision of services, which are selected from appropriate repositories and better suit the special needs of people with disabilities.