TAO/Accessibility Tool

Introduction
The Content Accessibility Checker (CAC) is a tool developed by the TAO Consortium. It is freely available and is expected to improve social interaction and user experience in general.



Recommendations
How the CAC Tool can help to Make Online Communities More Accessible for Older Adults

The CAC Tool, applied to a web site (resp. to any html page), automatically checks for issues such as missing alternative texts for images, insufficient contrast, incorrect tagging of tables, missing semantic structuring and many more.

With practical recommendations and examples for improvement Online Communities can easily check and revise their website content and adapt the CAC Tool's suggestions.

Theoretical Information
Although the internet is essential for people to access information and share common interests in places such as Wikipedia or Seniorweb communities, studies have shown that many web sites manifest obstacles for people with disabilities that often occur during the third age such as debility of sight. About 15-20% of internet users suffer from sensory, motor or cognitive limitations. This ratio is significantly higher among the elderly.

Based on the analysis of existing tools such as WAVE, WebThing, and also based on long-year experience in analyzing web sites, recommendations for improvement have been implemented in the CAC tool (Content Accessibility Checker). Applied to any html web site, it checks for Accessibility issues. It also gives recommendations based on the WCAG standard for improvement of the website under consideration. Authors of web content, community editors and CMS maintainers using CAC obtain immediate hints for improvement of the web content. The CAC has been successfully integrated in our wiki system and is also available as a browser plugin. It is freely available and is expected to improve social interaction and user experience in general.

For the moment the Tool is available only in German language, but as an open source tool it is free to be adapted and expected to be available in English soon.

Links to Other Handbook Chapters
Accessibility

Chapter on "Target Groups" (gives an overview of older adults as a target group for online communities)

Older Adults and Online Communities