Thiago Jabur Bittar

An approach based on metrics for monitoring web accessibility in Brazilian municipalities web sites

Monitoring and measuring the accessibility of government Web sites is an important challenge for regulators and policy makers. Moreover, over the next few years, e-government (e-gov) services are expected to expand and it is necessary to ensure access for everyone. In this paper, we present a metric based approach for evaluating municipalities Web pages using automatic accessibility evaluation tools. The sampling of the pages was done by the tool E-GOVMeter, and the accessibility evaluation and generation of the metrics was done by means of an adaptation of the tool Hera. The results show that much work should be done to improve the accessibility of Brazilian municipalities Web sites. Although it has limitations, the use of automatically generated accessibility metrics is a powerful tool for helping measuring and monitoring the accessibility of e-gov Web sites.

Web communication and interaction modeling using model-driven development

During the development of web-based applications, communication and interaction issues have become even more important, due to the variety of user types that can work together. In this paper we describe the adoption of Model-Driven Development (MDD) approach to support a feasible way to help developers to take into account the issues, regarding to the Web users variety. In general, a good design of the interactions and communication issues implies in high cost and time consuming tasks, and requires that developers be flexible and rapidly change the conception of the interfaces. The meta-models approach presented in this paper aims to map interaction and communication requirements in a practical and useful way during the web application development.

WCAG conformance approach based on model-driven development and WebML

Accessibility is an important quality attribute for Web applications. The W3C has defined a set of guidelines that must be followed to deploy accessible web applications, however there is no process that support WCAG requirements during the software development lifecycle. This work proposes the inclusion of the WCAG 2.0 accessibility concerns in a Model-Driven Development, more specifically in the WebML process.

Developing and evaluating web multimodal interfaces - a case study with usability principles

In this paper we describe an approach to facilitate the design of Web multimodal interfaces aiming at improving the user experience and the user interface usability using speech recognition together with the usual graphical user interfaces. We present a proposal for usability evaluation based on the heuristic evaluation, which considers the multimodal principles identified during a case study. As a result of using the proposed approach in the case study and from literature review, we report our considerations for the design, development and improvement of the Web multimodal interfaces.

A fine-grained and flexible version control for software artifacts

Version control is an activity very important for high-quality software production. The structure used by version control systems is the same used by file systems, but in general the abstraction level made by software developers considers the file contents and its internal structure, including details as classes, methods, control blocks and others. Fine-grained version control tools can provide a more detailed version control. However traditional tools and models provide very low flexibility and present high cost and impact of deployment in software development environments. In this paper, there are presented a model and a tool which aim at providing support to fine-grained version control activities.

RISK MANAGEMENT IN SOFTWARE PRODUCT LINE ENGINEERING: A MAPPING STUDY

Software Product Line (SPL) Engineering focuses on systematic software reuse, which has benefits such as reductions in time-to-market and effort, and improvements in the quality of products. However, establishing a SPL is not a simple matter, and can affect all aspects of the organization, since the approach is complex and involves major investment and considerable risk. These risks can have a negative impact on the expected ROI for an organization, if SPL is not sufficiently managed. This paper presents a mapping study of Risk Management (RM) in SPL Engineering. We analyzed a set of thirty studies in the field. The results points out the need for risk management practices in SPL, due to the little research on RM practices in SPL and the importance of identifying insight on RM in SPL. Most studies simply mention the importance of RM, however the steps for managing risk are not clearly specified. Our findings suggest that greater attention should be given, through the use of industrial case studies and experiments, to improve SPL productivity and ensure its success. This research is a first attempt within the SPL community to identify, classify, and manage risks, and establish mitigation strategies.

Supporting the developer in an accessible edition of web communications: a study of five desktop tools

Existing guidelines on Web applications development with accessibility are currently not applied by many developers. In this study, the existence and operation of accessibility features in Web authoring tools were verified. In order to do this, five authoring tools were selected to perform an analysis by inspection for several accessibility features. In the same way, a set of criteria involving the search and testing of 14 features which support developers was defined. Inspected features are directly related to the W3C documents ATAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0. As a result, important considerations about the inspection were made and it was determined that the tools already provide some support for accessibility although they are still far from ideal scenario.

Accessible organizational elements in wikis with model-driven development

Wiki is a web collaborative tool for promoting rapid publication of information, by allowing users to edit, add or revise content through a web browser. Despite various benefits offered by the use of wikis, there is no guarantee of a good structure of its content. This occurs, especially, because of the flexibility and easiness on creating and referencing pages and also for the reason that difficulty to graphically visualize the information architecture. In this paper it is proposed a Model-Driven Development (MDD) approach that supports creating graphical models of namespaces to generate structured wikis code. In addition, this approach also aims to include accessibility features on models from official W3C guidelines such as WCAG and ATAG, allowing access by a wider range of users.

A4U - an approach to evaluation considering accessibility and usability guidelines

The Web presents an extensive information content available to diverse people, with different abilities and needs. For this reason, the evaluation for the universal accessibility and the usability are difficult tasks, even though having automatic tools to support them. In this context, it is also observed that the relationship between usability attributes and accessibility is too little explicitly considered, consisting of a research issue to be investigated. To support the integrated evaluation of accessibility and usability criteria, it was developed an environment for analyzing results of accessibility and usability assessments, thus allowing human evaluation, and the inclusion of evaluation results generated by semi-automatic tools, leading the evaluator to produce improvements on both fronts. We performed a case study, in which we observed the difficulties of inexperienced developers related to the description of the guidelines documented by the W3C and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The cost for ensuring the objective criteria was the number of criteria to be checked, which tends to be high, leading to excessive time to review the application, but the experience in considering the concepts related to accessibility and usability, in the same environment, was positive.

UM ESTUDO SISTEMÁTICO SOBRE JOGOS DIGITAIS EDUCACIONAIS NO BRASIL

O numero de artigos cientificos publicados sobre Jogos Digitais Educacionais tem aumentado consideravelmente nos ultimos anos e, consequentemente, ha um aumento em relacao a quantidade de informacoes que devem ser consideradas para analises e possiveis conclusoes sobre a area. Neste sentido, o principal objetivo deste trabalho e apresentar uma Revisao Sistematica, focando na area da Engenharia de Software Empirica, sobre Jogos Digitais Educacionais. Para tanto, foram analisados um conjunto de estudos disponilizados em canais de publicacao relevantes, nos ultimos dez anos (de 2004 a 2014). A selecao dos artigos para este trabalho limitou-se a trabalhos desenvolvidos no Brasil, devido ao numero de artigos que poderiam estar presentes se nao houvesse esse criterio. Assim, buscou-se coletar informacoes para se ter um mapeamento em relacao ao que tem sido desenvolvido e o que necessita ainda ser melhor explorado na area. Como resultados reportados com este trabalho, foi gerada uma base de conhecimento acerca das praticas e tecnicas para o desenvolvimento de Jogos Digitais Educacionais, bem como das licoes aprendidas sobre a utilizacao destes em diferentes ambientes, independente do publico alvo para o qual os jogos foram desenvolvidos. Adicionalmente, foi observado que, apesar do numero de artigos sobre o tema, muitos dos estudos selecionados para este trabalho nao apresentam detalhes sobre a metodologia utilizada e questoes de desenvolvimento.