Article

A Web browser provides a uniform user interface to different types of
information. Making this interface universally accessible and more interactive is
a long-term goal still far from being achieved. Universally accessible browsers
require novel interaction modalities and additional functionalities, for which
existing browsers tend to provide only partial solutions. Although functionality
for Web accessibility can be found as open source and free software components,
their reuse and integration is complex because they were developed in diverse
implementation environments, following standards and conventions incompatible
with the Web. To address these problems, we have started several activities that
aim at exploiting the potential of open-source software for Web accessibility.
The first of these activities is the development of Adaptable Multi-Interface
COmmunicator (AMICO):WEB, an infrastructure that facilitates efficient reuse and
integration of open source software components into the Web environment. The main
contribution of AMICO:WEB is in enabling the syntactic and semantic
interoperability between Web extension mechanisms and a variety of integration
mechanisms used by open source and free software components. Its design is based
on our experiences in solving practical problems where we have used open source
components to improve accessibility of rich media Web applications. The second of
our activities involves improving education, where we have used our platform to
teach students how to build advanced accessibility solutions from diverse
open-source software. We are also partially involved in the recently started
Eclipse projects called Accessibility Tools Framework (ACTF), the aim of which is
development of extensible infrastructure, upon which developers can build a
variety of utilities that help to evaluate and enhance the accessibility of
applications and content for people with disabilities. In this article we briefly
report on these activities.

Langue : ANGLAIS