Integrating Universal Design into a Global Approach for Managing Very Large Web Sites

Very Large Web Sites are a particular category of web sites where the potential of traditional evaluation process for ensuring usability is significantly contracted by the size of the web site. Since this kind of web site is authored, designed, evaluated, and maintained by a wide variety of people who have specific information demands over a huge set of web pages, we believe that Universal Design principles should be integrated into the current approach for managing such web sites. We propose to support Universal Design principles by integrating related guidelines into a global approach for managing Very Large Web Sites. This approach is supported by Extended Bobby, an extension of the Bobby tool that provides (i) evaluation on demand ; (ii) a repair tool that proposes to authors of web pages new HTML code fixing usability problems that Extended Bobby itself has merely identified and explained ; (iii) a usability site tracker that keeps track of usability problems of the web sites, automatically sends e-mails to authors with the repair proposal, and helps site managers and webmasters to manage the pages evolving in time.