Collaborative environments: accessibility and usability for users with special needs

Accessibility and usability are relevant characteristics when considering the design and development of interactive environments especially when the target users have different forms of disability. Guaranteeing the inclusion of such characteristics poses new challenges in Web 2.0 collaborative environments because their users can have the role of both producers and consumers of information (the produsers of information). The purpose of this chapter is to specify the expected characteristics of accessible and usable collaborative systems tailored for produsers who have special needs. Hence, usability models are reviewed and the W3C guidelines and approaches for guaranteeing accessibility are reported. Then an accessible e-learning wiki-based environment is presented and, finally, a specific usability model is proposed that could overcome some of the problems that have emerged when analyzing the usability of such a collaborative environment.