GAIA: a proposal guide of recommendations of Web interfaces accessibility with focus on Autism aspects

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the proposal of an open-source and open access website designed to share a set of web accessibility guidelines for people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) called GAIA, which intends to help web developers to design accessible web interfaces for these users. The guidelines were extracted from a revision process of 17 works published between 2005 and 2015 including international recommendations, commercial or academic software and peer-reviewed papers. We identified 107 guidelines that were grouped in 10 categories through affinity diagram technique. Then, we normalized the guidelines in each group according to similarities and duplicated statements, generating a set of 28 guidelines. As a result, we evidenced best practices to design accessible web interfaces for people with ASD based on well-succeeded solutions presented in works of different contexts. To ensure the usefulness of the guidelines, it was conducted a remote pilot evaluation with technology professionals where they were asked to perform an accessibility evaluation of an educational web application using GAIA. The results were positive, indicating practical application of GAIA and it was possible to identify improvements and adjustments for the content of the guidelines. With those results, we aim to contribute to the state of the art of cognitive web accessibility. Therefore, we made the set of guidelines available in a repository on GitHub, so it can be used both by researchers and by technical professionals.