Improving WCAG for elderly web accessibility

  • Authors:

  • Silvana Maria Affonso de Lara;Willian Massami Watanabe;Eduardo Pezutti Beletato dos Santos;Renata P. M. Fortes

  • Affiliations:

  • University of São Paulo, São Carlos/SP, Brazil;University of São Paulo, São Carlos/SP, Brazil;University of São Paulo, São Carlos/SP, Brazil;University of São Paulo, São Carlos/SP, Brazil

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The increase of aging people and the possibilities that are extended to the Internet users have led studies into improvement of web accessibility solutions for older people [30]. Most older adults present some decline in their cognitive, visual, hearing and motor skills [13]. Nowadays, however, the Web faces new technological challenges that extend the initial idea of cross-platform and inter-operational nature of the HTML and HTTP. The challenges are posed as accessibility barriers and consider the skills, capabilities, culture, languages, disabilities, among other characteristics related to the user as a human being, in contrast to the hardware and software requirements previously addressed. The human characteristics of the challenge can be seeing as the ultimate barrier of the initial Web requirements of cross-platform and inter-operational environment, and goes towards social inclusion of people whatever differences they might present in the Web. In this paper we propose the establishment of a new set of success criteria that address older users accessibility into the normative document of WCAG 2.0. The proposed recommendations were identified from a composition of usability studies with real older users and were tested for different scenarios.