Justification of the need for an ontology for accessibility requirements (Theoretic framework)

The aim of this paper is to make a case generally for an ontology for accessibility requirements specification. Requirements specification is generally intended to provide clear, testable descriptions of what a system should do. What an ontology would do is to act like a requirements bank that provides methodology independent accessibility requirements that could then be used to extrapolate, on demand, conceptual models for a variety of implementations driven by a variety of methodologies. The effect of this would be to minimise requirements specification, ensure declarativity, standardisation, interoperability and reusability, whilst at the same time lending greater migratability from specification to design.There has been much worldwide action in developing guidelines, tools and methods in an attempt to ensure that technologies and information systems are accessible. There is, however, a growing need to partner these initiatives more closely with software engineering traditions. An ontology for accessibility requirements would provide formal semantic specifications beyond the syntactic provisions rendered by commonly used formal specification languages.