Toward a WCAG-first Responsibility Framework for Treating Accessibility as a First-Class Quality Attribute in Web Systems

• Letícia C. M. M. Awawdeh UFLA
• Miguel A. F. R. Silva UFLA
• Gabriel A. Moreira UFLA
• Sandra S. Rodrigues UFLA
• Bento R. Siqueira UFLA
• Anderson C. Garcia USP
• Diego Saqui UFLA

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/webmedia.2026.30343

Resumo

Web accessibility is often operationalized through interfacelevel checks, after relevant development decisions have already been made. This work proposes a preliminary responsibility framework that treats accessibility as a first-class quality concern in Web software development, rather than as a posthoc interface check. The framework maps selected WCAG 2.2 concerns to responsibilities distributed across three modules: semantic data exposure, component contract definition, and architectural governance. Each module is independently adoptable and includes explicit traceability links between accessibility requirements, development decisions, implementation artifacts, and validation evidence. Motivated by the implementation context of a digital Mini-mental State Examination for Children (MMC), the proposal is illustrated through a usage scenario and evaluated through a preliminary traceability-oriented inspection that compares it against a conventional WCAG-as-checklist baseline. The inspection is descriptive rather than causal: it indicates that the proposed framework makes responsibility allocation and accessibility evidence more explicit than the baseline, but it does not involve an implementation, a user study, or a measurement of accessibility outcomes.

Palavras-chave: Digital accessibility, WCAG 2.2, Web software engineering, Responsibility framework, Software architecture, Assistive technologies

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