A consortium of researchers and user organisations from across Europe is investigating the accessibility of Web 2.0 applications for older adults and people with disabilities. The group will then create new tools to help developers produce applications that are more accessible to these groups.

The original World Wide Web — Web 1.0 — was largely about people receiving information: reading text, viewing images and watching videos. Now the Web has evolved, very rapidly, into Web 2.0, in which people not only receive information but also create their own information, whether that is updating their status on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, uploading their photographs to sites like Flickr or Picasa, or undertaking complex transactions on on-line banking or government websites. More and more, users are interacting with the Web, not simply reading it.

More usable by older adults and people with disabilities.

Currently there is very little support for developers of Web 2.0 applications on how to make their applications usable by older adults and people with disabilities. Incompatibilities between assistive technologies and Web 2.0 applications can cause further accessibility barriers. The I2Web project aims to develop tools that will help web developers write applications that are more usable by older adults and people with disabilities. The project will also create modules that allow applications to adapt to the needs and strategies of by older adults and people with disabilities and allow the applications to work with their assistive devices and software better.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT in Germany is leading the €2.7 million project, called “Inclusive Future Internet Web Services” (I2Web), which is supported by the Software and Services Unit of the EU Framework 7 ICT Programme. FIT is also participating in the development of the tools for the project.

The project is managed on behalf of NCBI by Dr. Bláithín Gallagher, Head of Projects and Research. Initial work within the project has investigated the ways that disabled and older people currently use Web 2.0, particularly the strategies that they use. Dr. Mark Magennis, Director of NCBI’s Centre for Inclusive Technology (CFIT) and Dr. Emma Murphy, ICT Accessibility Researcher at CFIT, were involved in conducting an extensive user requirement study to capture the strategies that older people and people with disabilities adopt when interacting with Web 2.0 applications on computers, mobile phones and digital TV.

I2Web industry partners in e-banking (Hewlett Packard, Italy), e-government (Public-I, UK) and multi-channel delivery systems (Polymedia, Italy) are currently developing prototypes of Web 2.0 applications and related modules that can adapt to the needs and strategies of older users identified in the requirements gathering phase of the project. NCBI’s CFIT in collaboration the other I2Web user organisations (FAST, UK and the University of York, UK) will evaluate these prototypes and modules with users. The outcome of the user evaluations will inform the development of prototypes and related modules to ensure that the applications are accessible. While the traditional approach to accessibility is based on trying to eliminate the problems that people encounter, the I2Web approach is based on the positive strategies that people use and building applications that adapt to the user, instead of the other way around.

For further information on the I2Web project please contact:
Dr. Bláithín Gallagher Head of EU Projects & Research, NCBI.
Email: blaithin.gallagher@ncbi.ie

Dr. Carlos A. Velasco, Project Leader for the I2Web Project and Director of the Web Compliance Centre of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology. Email: webcc@fit.fraunhofer.de.