Agile accessibility assessment: Development and evaluation of native software

The information and communication technologies (ICT) have the potential to improve the quality of life of individual with functional particularities, potentiating their activity in society, as well supplying the conditions for a prolonged active life, counter acting the natural age related lost of faculties. As such, the software component — of ICT — is lacking a good and attentive construction to these functioning details which, often, are of difficult assessment. Adding to these constrains, the existing information is, not exclusively but especially, focused on Web contents. Attending to these matters, a checklist of proposals has been elaborated, and presented in this paper, that tries to cover these flaws, allowing for an evaluation of the accessibility of Integrated Development Environments (IDE), their capacity of generating accessible software — native software and not Web contents — and even the accessibility of the final product — the native software. Conceived through the reutilization and inspired on the general knowledge created by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), the drafts of this checklist are easily understandable and applicable. With the objective of facilitating the work of information systems technician who may already have concerns regarding these topics, it further has the important potential of encouraging agents to initiate themselves into the cares that this are requires.