Improving WCAG for elderly web accessibility

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 crossplatform 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.