Beginning with naming some of the most important advantages of Internet usability, this paper focuses on accessibility for users and groups of users in terms of remote collaboration. The results center on the authors’ Social Accessibility Project, through which they have collected important feedback from users over the years, and have defined collaborative accessibility improvements for disabled or elderly people accessing the Web.

Two key underlying technologies to the authors’ approach are metadata-based transcoding and metadata authoring. With the help of the Social Accessibility Project, site owners can make their Web pages more accessible without changing the content, by using external metadata.

The authors present limitations and challenges encountered in the search for standardization models. Related work includes: Bookshare, which helps blind people access collaboratively scanned documents; Helen, a Web site that offers rating features to blind users; and Google Image Labeler, which aims to precisely label objects inside images.

Apart from the technical details of how the platform works, the authors present some interesting use cases. Three success stories are offered: fixing information overload on a hospital’s Web page; correcting the interface design of a radio station Web site; and identifying and fixing accessibility issues on a local foundation’s Web site.