BellChat: An Inclusive Web Application for Messaging

The goal of the web is universal access, but minority groups of web users, such as people with disabilities and elderly people, are limited in their ability to communicate through chat applications. These types of applications include social networking, which are especially used in communication among their users. However, social networks such as Facebook (Messenger), Twitter and WhatsApp are not adapted for these groups, and therefore, they do not fully meet the needs for which they were created. Moreover, for people with disabilities to use web-based messaging applications, they are required to use third-party tools, such as screen readers. For these reasons, this paper presents BellChat, a responsive web application for communication between everybody, adapted for people with disabilities, especially for those ones with visual or hearing disabilities. It was developed following the Scrum development framework with adaptations to very small groups, where the roles were modified to be according to the project team. In addition, developers worked remotely and meetings were held in person twice a week. BellChat is the only application adapted to convert text messages into speech, or speech messages into text, depending on the disability of the user who is connected. The evaluation results confirm the acceptance of the application by users.