WEB COMPOSITION WITH ACCESSIBILITY IN MIND

Abstract

Web accessibility should be a part of the Web design process instead of being a postdesign repair process. Thus, it should be more integrated within the internal authoring tools’ mechanism of generating new accessible Web contents. Web pages are usually composed of small pieces of HTML code which, dynamically nested and combined, generate full Web pages. This Web composition, specially when creating Web pages from data extracted from heterogeneous or external sources, should have accessibility into account in order to guarantee that the final page being constructed is accessible. This paper presents the set of rules that, in a Web composition process, a design tool must follow in order to guarantee that the Web pages being generated are accessible. These rules are formalized with W3C standards like XPath and XQuery expressions (so they are vendor-neutral). We also present WSLS as an accessibility enabled authoring tool that makes this task feasible, and focus on how this tool incorporates accessibility into the process of generating new Web contents.