Example scenario

John is a blind software developer who has just been hired by Consultech, a large consultancy firm as a back-end software engineer. John has been working for a while as a software coder, focusing on very targeted tasks such as the implementation of functions, but now he's able to deal with more complex engineering activities. In his daily work, John uses a PC equipped with a general purpose screen reading software, which he uses to read accessible documentation and interact with accessible software (including his choice IDE). Consultech is developing a multi-device application to manage the historical collection of a library. John has been commissioned with the development of MySQL database that will store the library collection metadata, a Java EE RESTful server-side application that will handle requests to perform any operations on the database, and a set of BPEL processes to orchestrate complex processes that may involve different human and software agents (e.g. borrowers, librarians, third-party libraries).

As an input for his work, John is provided with a textual specification of the components he is in charge of developing, together with a model of the domain of the problem (represented as a high-level UML class diagram) and the processes to be managed by the system (represented as a set of BPMN diagrams). John needs to access these documents through the assistive technologies of his choice, which cannot present purely graphical content (such as the mentioned diagrams). Instead, John uses GRACES to open the files provided by his colleagues, which include an abstract model represented in a standardized formal language, and which have been generated by a general-purpose modelling tool. GRACES presents the contents of those files in an accesible way, by exposing the contents of the model to John's screen reader. John can navigate across the model through semantically rich links which focus on the structure of the model, rather than on the visual description.

Besides, together with the source and object code that implement the required functionalities, John must deliver a set of technical documentation that include the structural model of the detailed design of the Java Enterprise Application (again, as a set of UML class diagrams, resulting from the refinement of the original domain model), as well as the data model of the database (as an Information Engineering style ERD). With that purpose, John uses the same GRACES tool to edit the existent diagrams or create new diagrams from scratch.