RE: WAI and WAI-AGE project: Understanding of Accessibility Requirements Due to Ageing

Dear Tony

Thank you for sharing this report.

I'd be interested to know if you have more evidence for the 4 functional declines you list on pages 16-17. The scenarios read as very hypothetical. Is there any evidence for them? I know you reference a paper by Rowland, but that is only a single paper and is 6 years old.

BTW, I draw your attention to a slight typo. At the end of the second paragraph on page 16, you refer to the paper by Boham and Anderson as 2004, but it should be 2005. Furthermore, back in the early 2000s I co-authored a couple of papers with Shane Anderson and Paul Bohman, including one on cognitive issues. I assume they are the people you are referring to here, in which case you have misspelled Paul's surname throughout your document.

Regards, Oliver

-----Original Message-----
From: public-wai-age-request@w3.org [mailto:public-wai-age-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Tony Elliman (Brunel)
Sent: Monday, 21 June 2010 5:25 PM
To: jbrewer@w3.org; andrew@w3.org
Cc: public-wai-age@w3.org; JUNIQUE Francois; INFSO-IST-034106@ec.europa.eu
Subject: WAI and WAI-AGE project: Understanding of Accessibility Requirements Due to Ageing

Dear Ms Brewer and Dr Arch

For the past 3 1/2 years I have been coordinating an EU project [DIADEM contract 034106] which looked specifically at producing assistive web-based technology to enable older people with cognitive declines to confidently and successfully interact with online forms. The project looked at two relatively unexplored aspects of assistive technology within the eInclusion agenda. First it tackled the cognitive declines of later life and second it addressed the specific task of online data entry to obtain a good or service.

I believe the WAI-AGE project is already aware of my colleague Dr Lorna Lines work on web accessibility for older users. She was responsible for leading the initial investigations and the trial activities within the DIADEM project.

As part of our concluding activities we have summarised the lessons learned within the DIADEM project as a public report (attached). I now wish to offer this to the WAI-AGE task force as a contribution to the project's work on understanding accessibility requirements due to ageing.

The guidelines we have developed are specifically related to online forms rather than web pages in general or information retrieval tasks. In some cases they re-enforce WCAG 2.0 guidelines and your specific guidance in "Developing Websites for Older People". However, there are also some new issues raised in our work.

As part of the project we identify two areas of W3C work on standards which appear to us as gaps in the programme.

First there is the need to distinguish between transactions (as perceived by
users) and forms (as units of interaction between user agents and servers).
The current moves to wards web 2.0 and AJAX scripting technology emphasise the need for such a clearly defined distinction.

AJAX technology also presents significant difficulties for assistive technology (like DIADEM) leading to our second comment on the standards framework.. Assistive technology is treated as a bolt on bit at the end of the delivery chain, which limits its effectiveness. We believe treating it as part of the normal system architecture would ensure standards recognise its importance and overcome these limitations.

Please don't hesitate to contact me (tony.elliman@brunel.ac.uk) if you wish to discuss further our findings or how they may be of use to you. The projects confidential deliverables have more details than we present in the attached document and further extracts from them could be probably be shared with a wider audience where this is appropriate.

Yours Sincerely

Dr A D (Tony) Elliman
	BTech, MBCS, MIET, CITP, CEng
DIADEM Project Co-ordinator & BIAS Director for ICT and Ageing Reader, School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK

Received on Tuesday, 22 June 2010 13:01:07 UTC