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INSTITUTO DE COMPUTAÇÃO UNIVERSIDADE ESTADUAL DE CAMPINAS A Systematic Literature Review on Awareness of Others in Accessible Collaborative RIAs Leonelo D. A. Almeida M. Cecília C. Baranauskas Technical Report - IC-12-26 - Relatório Técnico December - 2012 - Dezembro The contents of this report are the sole responsibility of the authors. O conteúdo do presente relatório é de única responsabilidade dos autores. A Systematic Literature Review on Awareness of Others in Accessible Collaborative RIAs Leonelo D. A. Almeida, M. Cecília C. Baranauskas Institute of Computing, University of Campinas (UNICAMP) Albert Einstein Av., 1251, 13083-970, Campinas-SP, Brazil {leonelo.almeida, cecilia}@ic.unicamp.br Abstract. The more robust and dynamic aspects of Web 2.0 applications (also named Rich Internet Applications, RIAs) stimulate the participation and collaboration among people while interacting with such shared interaction spaces. An evident consequence (e.g. Facebook, Instagran, and Twitter) is the increasing influence of RIAs on other media channels as TV and newspapers. However, the current state-of-art of Web 2.0 does not provide equitative opportunities of interaction for people. Accessibility in RIAs is still a challenging objective. Also, for aspects as awareness of others on RIAs that provided collaboration features the development of accessible mechanisms is not restricted to semantic markup but it also involves data structures, politeness, load of data, and other characteristics. This technical report presents a Systematic Literature Review process designed for investigating the aspect of awareness of others in accessible collaborative RIAs; it also reports included and excluded studies and the data collected from the reviewed studies. Keywords: Web 2.0, Accessibility, Systematic Literature Review. 1 Introduction The Web is no longer a collection of static content made available through URLs [GIBa]. The second wave of Web sites, also known as Web 2.0 brought significant innovations not only restricted to technology but also on social aspects [BUR, BAR]. In the Web 2.0 aspects as user participation, collaboration, real-time interaction, awareness of others, and social networking are in the spotlight [GIBa, MORb, GIBb]. Also, websites are evolving to Web applications, renamed Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) [LUN]. Such applications are increasingly becoming more robust and some of them can already rival to desktop applications. Mesbah et al. [MES] points some reasons: no installation effort on the client- side; everybody using the most recent version; access from anywhere with Internet access (both to applications and user data); new collaboration and community building opportunities. Interaction spaces in RIAs can be highly dynamic, and content updates in a RIA can involve responses for user requests and environment updates (i.e., updates automatically triggered by the RIA). Both the types of updates occur without needing reloading the whole page, in such cases they are called asynchronous. The environment updates are especially important in collaborative RIAs i.e. RIAs in which users collaborate with each other in shared interaction spaces. A significant amount of such updates are concerned in enabling awareness of others’ identity, presence, actions, objects, etc. The novel possibilities enabled by RIAs are essential to support relevant aspects Web 2.0 as participation and collaboration. On the other hand, there is an increasing concerning in the access to RIAs. RIAs should not only be accessible by every person but also provide equivalent possibilities of participation and collaboration [MORa]. Initially focused on people with disabilities and AT (Assistive Technologies e.g. voice browsers, screen readers) used by them to access computer applications [ELL], accessibility can the extended to every person since people are different in diverse aspects and also affected by context [AKH, MORb] and temporary constraining situations. Accessibility features are not restricted to the User Interface (UI), they can also influence the application structure and overall features [JES]. Semantic markup is a relevant resource for proving accessible means for Web content. In (collaborative) RIAs semantics must also provide information about state transitions and the dynamic updates in the (shared) interaction space, especially those related to awareness of others. Since RIAs involves the investigation and proposition of new standards, design patterns, authoring tools, development frameworks, script languages, user agents, and other supportive technologies; there is currently diverse researches and products coming from academy, industry, non-profitable organizations, and some joint actions. However, the knowledge about this research topic is still fragmented and usually results in a lack to standardized behavior of the existing RIAs. As a consequence, people, especially those with disabilities, face several problems while interacting with RIAs [BUZ, SCH], even whether using RIAs built on development frameworks [MIK]. This text presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of studies approaching awareness of others in collaborative accessible RIAs aiming at identifying possible guidelines for the area. The objective of the SLR is composed of four review questions that involves: (1) disabilities being considered, and the geographical and publishing distribution, (2) awareness of others, (3) recommendations, guidelines and design patterns (called of RecGuidPat for means of simplification), and (4) technologies. The review questions are formally defined in the review planning (Section 3). The SLR is divided in three parts: (1) provides an overview of the reviewed studies and focus on aspects related to the first two review questions, (2) investigates RecGuidPat that have the potential for contributing for accessibility in RIAs (3) compiles every technology mentioned, evaluated, proposed or extended by the reviewed studies. This text presents the review process designed for this SLR and the data collected in the data extraction activity. This text is organized as follows: Next section presents background information in which this SLR is situated. Following, we present the designed SLR process. After, the SLR results and, finally, the final considerations. 2 Background The term Web 2.0 was proposed by Tim O'Reilly [ORE] in order to identify a movement towards a more participative and collaborative Web. Web 2.0 does not imply a new version of the Web; it coexists with those traditional static page-oriented websites. Rather, Web 2.0 applications involve existing and novel technologies in order to produce high dynamic and interactive applications. This shift from navigation though pages to applications more likely to desktop applications motivated another concept, the Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Initially focused on Flash- and ActionScript-based applications, currently RIAs are widely employed to refer Web applications, regardless technology. The innovation stimulated by the (collaborative) RIAs brings challenges for accessibility. Some issues in the development process are: limited capabilities for crawling and evaluating dynamic content [VEL], low adherence to accessibility guidelines [ODE, JUT], the limited or absent participation of people with disabilities [FOG], the reduced number of experts in the area [FOG], just for a few examples. Also, common issues present in (collaborative) RIAs are navigation history not properly stored in user agents [ODE], lack of awareness of asynchronous content updates, and overload of notifications. Moreover RIAs represent a change of interaction paradigm since people that use AT as screen readers are tied to a linear navigation approach, while content updates in RIAs can move focus from an area to another of the application without following a rigid sequence. The challenging objective of developing accessible Web content that provide access for people with different skills without segregating them, instigated the development of accessibility guidelines (e.g. WCAG 2.0 [W3Cc], Section508 [USA]), authoring tools (e.g. Dojo1, Google Web Toolkit - GWT2), evaluation tools (e.g. semi-automatic evaluation3), techniques (e.g. [GAV, THI]), among other resources. For RIAs, W3C also provides a set of guidelines, the WAI-ARIA [W3Cb] that provides additional roles, states, and properties 1 http://dojotoolkit.org/. 2 https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/. 3 Examples are: http://achecker.ca/checker/index.php and http://www.cynthiasays.com/. to the markup in order to expose dynamic updates and the semantic of widgets to the assistive technology. Also, the HTML5 brings diverse contributions to semantics as the elements "head", "footer", "nav" (currently implemented using "div"s, which lacks semantic value), new more advanced input types, and a better integration to scripts. 3 Review Process This research systematically reviewed the emerging topic of accessibility in (Collaborative) Rich Internet Applications, focusing on contributions regarding awareness of others. Since scope of Rich Internet Applications is broad, studies regarding this theme are spread across various not specialized channels e.g., congress tracks and periodicals approaching Web. The review process adopted in this research considered the recommendations from Kitchenham [KIT], that proposed a systematic review process for the Software Engineering community, based on the Cochrane Reviewer’s Handbook [COC], the guidelines from Australian National