Widget Design Authoring Toolkit
Elaine Pearson, Franck-Olivier Perrin · 2014 · Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A) · doi:10.1145/2596695.2596724
Summary
This paper presents WIDGaT (Widget Design and Authoring Toolkit), an open-source, code-free online tool that enables non-technical teaching and support staff to create personalised widgets for disabled students in higher education. The project, developed at Teesside University's Accessibility Research Centre with UK JISC funding, responds to a 58.4% increase in disabled students in UK higher education between 1995 and 2009. The core problem is that proprietary assistive technology gives students little control over selecting individual components to match their specific needs, and creating even basic custom widgets requires coding skills beyond most educators. WIDGaT provides an intuitive drag-and-drop GUI that allows teachers to design, personalise, and adapt small self-contained web applications — widgets — without writing code. These widgets can function as assistive technology, learning aids, or components within personal learning environments (PLEs). Examples include form-filling support for motor disabilities, high-contrast themes for vision impairments, and symbol-based calendars for students with learning or cognitive disabilities who are non-text users. The toolkit was built entirely with free and open-source technologies and hosted on GitHub.
Key findings
WIDGaT was developed using an action research approach combining participatory design with agile methods, involving a Community of Practice throughout all phases from scoping to evaluation. This ensured that the widget types supported were specifically identified by both practitioners and disabled students as relevant to their learning needs. The toolkit produces widgets that comply with W3C widget standards (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, XML) and ARIA standards, and the development process followed W3C Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG). Evaluation by approximately 100 practitioners indicated WIDGaT was most useful for meeting the needs of students with learning disabilities, a group whose teachers already routinely develop personalised solutions. At the time of writing, WIDGaT was being used in a European project supporting students with autistic spectrum disorders in achieving mobility and employability, with teachers creating widgets to help students prepare for European travel. The commitment to open source over proprietary solutions like Flash created technical challenges for the drag-and-drop interface but aligned with the project's accessibility and sustainability goals.
Relevance
WIDGaT addresses a persistent gap in accessible education: the disconnect between what individual disabled students need and what generic assistive technology provides. By empowering non-technical educators to create bespoke widgets, the toolkit shifts accessible tool creation from developers to the people who best understand individual student needs. The adherence to ATAG is particularly noteworthy — while WCAG compliance of end-user content receives most attention, ATAG compliance of authoring tools is equally important for ensuring that the tools educators use to create content can themselves produce accessible output. For accessibility practitioners in education, WIDGaT demonstrates that personalisation at the individual learner level is achievable when the right authoring tools exist, and that open-source, standards-compliant approaches can enable this without locking institutions into proprietary platforms.
Tags: education accessibility · personalization · authoring tools · learning disabilities · assistive technology · open source · inclusive design · educational technology
Standards referenced: ARIA · ATAG · W3C Widget Standards · HTML5 · CSS3