Developing and Evaluating With Usability and Accessibility in Mind: A Case Study on Cultural Heritage Information Systems Almeraj, Zainab López Escudero, Luis Torres Cantero, Juan Carlos Over the last decade, interest in creating Cultural Heritage Information Systems (CHISystems) to document conservation and preservation efforts has grown globally. However, due to their interactive, multi-lingual, and distributed nature, their users face various usability challenges especially those systems developed or supervised in house by non UX/UI expert software designers and developers. Ongoing efforts to promote adopting usability and digital accessibility best practices are slowly making a difference, but more solutions are needed. This work aims to make international standards for basic usability and accessibility reachable and easy to recognize for researchers. The first of two contributions includes a simple heuristic evaluation framework, UsA11y, to guide in the adoption of digital accessibility and usability principles from early stages of the information system design, development and evaluation. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no simple and concise assessment targeting designers and developers with limited knowledge in UX/UI, especially in niche fields such as cultural heritage. The second contribution includes a usability test and a heuristic evaluation (with UsA11y) on an existing cultural heritage system with users in the field to gain insight into experiences and needs. This work also offers design implications and insights into effectively adopting usability and accessibility for researchers, designers and developers in light of universal design concepts to ensure reliably and sustainably. 2026-03-25T12:32:31Z 2026-03-25T12:32:31Z 2026-02-23 journal article Z. Almeraj, L. Lopez and J. C. T. Cantero, "Developing and Evaluating With Usability and Accessibility in Mind: A Case Study on Cultural Heritage Information Systems," in IEEE Access, vol. 14, pp. 34953-34970, 2026, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2026.3667446 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/112474 10.1109/ACCESS.2026.3667446 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional IEEE