Aligning accessibility design to non-disabled people’s perceptions

Many standards and guidelines have been proposed over the years to help web developers produce accessible content. Being designed to be suitable for application to the widest possible number of web technologies, such guidelines are often perceived as hard to understand, not suitable for practical problem solving, and under some circumstances even not really useful in order to develop an accessible website or application.As a consequence, many accompanying resources have been proposed to support developers in understanding accessibility guidelines and applying them to their projects, as well as a variety of testing tools to let them check the presence of accessibility issues in their code and provide guidance in fixing them. Yet, most web content available on the Inter.net still exhibit critical accessibility issues.In our opinion, this approach is non satisfactory, as the personal understanding of the developers is always mediated by written reports and indirect information that are not immediately understandable and actionable. In this paper we propose our approach to increase integration between development tools and accessibility testing tools in usual web development workflows. In particular they should be capable of mapping accessibility related concepts onto familiar and immediately perceivable information, so that developers can immediately pin ìssues and plan for solving them without lengthy and wordy reports.