Software Development

One of the project’s goals is to contribute to the improvement of the user experience for online community platforms with respect to usability and accessibility. The focus is on two platforms, namely MediaWiki and Drupal.

• MediaWiki is a popular, free, web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, one of the ten most-visited websites in the world. While the Wikimedia Foundation has carried out several projects to improve the user experience for average users of MediaWiki over the last few years and is continuing to do so, the main focus of the TAO project will be on improving the user experience for users with disabilities.
• Drupal is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) and content management framework (CMF) that is used as a back-end system for around 1.5% of all websites worldwide, including personal blogs, online communities as well as corporate, political, and government sites. The focus of the TAO project is to improve the usability of the platform and to implement some of the enhancements directly on the seniorweb.ch platform.

The research and development agenda consists of iterative steps, where each iteration starts with the identification of problematic aspects, followed by recommendations for improvement and/or optimization of selected target platforms.