USERfit Tool: A Design Tool Oriented towards Accessibility and Usability

This paper presents an application called USERfit Tool, developed to facilitate the use of the USERfit design methodology that was developed in order to generate usability and accessibility specifications. Though USERfit methodology was developed mainly for the Assistive Technology environment it has been adapted to the design of applications for any group of users. The principal difficulty experienced in the application of USERfit has been that because the information generated was handled using paper forms then the inclusion or elimination of users, change of user contexts, and the need to propagate data from one form to other tended to make the USERfit application tedious. In order to decrease the effort required to manage the information produced in the design process - and so facilitate the use of USERfit methodology - USERfit Tool allows the reuse of previously generated designs, and the sharing of a design among remote designers, therefore maintaining coherence and compatibility.