Accessibility information needs in the enterprise

Abstract

We describe the questions asked about accessibility, both through information searches and direct queries, within a large multinational corporation over a period of two years, finding an emphasis on topics covering enterprise requirements for testing, recording, and reporting compliance. Our analysis finds that up to 66% of these questions may be answerable by an accessibility ontology, but only 26% of the terms in the questions are concepts found in existing available accessibility ontologies. To fill this gap, we introduce the Enterprise Accessibility Conformance Ontology, which extends previous ontologies to include the relevant concepts. We demonstrate the use of the ontology to provide a unifying model of the accessibility domain that contributed to a 22% performance improvement for a question-answering accessibility conformance chatbot.