Coordinating user interfaces for consistency
The mythical man-month (anniversary ed.)
The mythical man-month (anniversary ed.)
CHI 99 SIG: universal web access: delivering services to everyone
ACM SIGCHI Bulletin
Achieving Universal Usability by Designing for Change
IEEE Internet Computing
Towards accessible semantic web applications
DCMI '05 Proceedings of the 2005 international conference on Dublin Core and metadata applications: vocabularies in practice
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The OCLC FirstSearch® service allows users to search for bibliographic and full text records in over 80 online databases. Web-based, FirstSearch was designed to adapt to unexpected user needs, platform considerations, languages, and changing requirements. The many unknowns during development necessitated an architecture that would allow many types of contributors to modify the interface easily and frequently. For example, marketing, documentation, and user interface designers edited the strings used in the interface, including translation; and user interface and graphic designers edited the screen layout. Structured initialization files with a simple convention for adapting to specific users, platforms, languages, etc., allowed continual broadening of the accessibility of the system without complicating the overall architecture.The paper begins with a discussion of the general requirements for FirstSearch (multi-platform, multi-lingual, levels of users, low-end hardware, accessible) and the need for better coordination of contributions from the FirstSearch team. The architecture is then described, which partitions the specification of the interface into platform - specific, language-specific, and language/platform independent functional components. The user interface, in the form of Web pages, is then generated dynamically (although it would also be possible to generate static pages). The paper ends with a discussion of experiences with the changes to the interface and a cost-benefit analysis of the architecture, with the overall conclusion that addressing many accessibility issues in the architecture facilitated individual accessibility issues.