Model driven approach for adapting user interfaces to the context of accessibility: case of visually impaired users

Abstract

For an effective and a useful solution for the accessibility of user interfaces (UIs), it is recommended to propose a generic approach as we notify the existence of different disability categories, various employed devices for UIs based on heterogeneous ubiquitous environments. This paper presents a generic approach for the adaptation of UIs to the accessibility context based on meta-model transformations. The proposed accessibility context is defined through five basic concepts: (1) type of disability, (2) used platform, (3) user identity, (4) user situation and (5) surrounded environment. The approach is also based on an adaptation process which takes as input the accessibility context of a given user and the UI model to adapt and provides as output the adapted UI model. This process is defined as a parametrized meta-model transformations. The meta-model transformations are based on mapping and adaptation rules implemented with Kermeta language. In this paper, we illustrate our approach using the case of visually impaired users. In addition, the paper presents an empirical study to evaluate the usability of our approach.