Accessibility and Activity-Centered Design for ICT Users: ACCESIBILITIC Ontology

Abstract

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are involved in daily human activities. Accessibility guarantees that individuals with different abilities can interact with ICTs. User profile models are an explicit representation of the characteristics of an individual and are used to reason about what users need. They are implemented through ontologies. After identifying common and different aspects among important ontologies in the domain of accessibility and e-inclusion, we designed and implemented the ACCESIBILITIC ontology applying the NeOn methodology, specifically by reusing and reengineering these ontologies. The strengths of our model include the user’s ability to develop a high variety of activities despite his/her disabilities, support for inference processes, and providing answers to several competency questions. ACCESIBILITIC allows the representation of suitable technical support based on the user’s capabilities when interacting with ICTs. To this end, we use an activity-centered design (ACD), which allows us to identify daily activities and to match these activities with a suitable technology to perform them.