A Lightweight Web GUI Specification and Realisation System and Its Impact on Accessibility

Developments like XFORMS are supposed to encourage the Web programmer to concentrate on the specification of the functionality of the Web GUI rather than its appearance on screen. Instead of having the document delivery system make the same realisation choices for every user it could be better to give the user some control in order to fully exploit this degree of choice. This would be particularly important for disabled users. This work shows how a functional specification of a GUI may be rendered in different ways to different users by using personal preferences residing in a user's profile. This extends previous work on profile-based Web document delivery. Because the GUI parts of pages are rendered according to their own personal preferences, the Web pages become more accessible to disabled users with very much reduced effort from the author of the pages. The technique does not require a specific or modified browser and can be easily implemented using a combination of common technologies