The number of older people using Internet is growing rapidly, but unfortunately many of today’s websites unintentionally alienate this growing segment of the world population by ignoring their peculiarities.
First of all, let’s understand why older people are using Internet in general. The reasons are nearly the same as for other demographic segments; emailing, keeping in touch with friends and loved ones, performing day to day errands such as banking or shopping. Some even have their own personal websites. The main purpose though is searching for information. Contrary to popular belief, the older generation is very open to using the Internet to search for products and services. Every day more and more seniors are learning about the exciting benefits of technology and the Internet.
Many seniors haven’t had the benefit of witnessing the evolution of website design and interactive media. They tend to get frustrated by flashy innovation. Many don’t have the intuitive sense for navigating through complex websites. Longevity also leads to degenerative effects. The eyes and ears don’t work as well as they used to, attention spans wane, the memory bank isn’t what it used to be. As such, websites targeted at this audience must consider a number of guidelines if they wish to be successful.
Though studies show the attitude of the elderly towards computers is no different than younger adults, elderly people do face age-related difficulties in accessing and using technology. To achieve general usability for the elderly, we need to understand the implications of age-related changes in functional abilities for the web design and implementation online solutions.
There are two core obstacles that impair general usability for the elderly. First, most of the current elderly population has spent the bulk of their life span without computing technology, so they usually have either no or very limited experience with the technology. In addition, the elderly generally face a number of technology accessibility impediments related to income and education.
Second, elderly people may face technology usability impediments related to physical, mental, and cognitive impairments. Although these impairments vary a lot, what is known is that certain abilities related to vision, hearing, psychomotor skills, attention span, and memory can degrade with age. Older people show a reduction in the width of their visual field, light sensitivity, color perceptions, resistance to glare, dynamic and static acuity, contrast sensitivity, visual search and processing, and pattern recognition. Their reasoning ability also declines. So the goal of improved website design is to minimize the burden on all these aspects, when designing a website.
If you wish your website to be a success among the older population, then pay attention to the following key factors.
- Content
- Always provide text equivalent to visual and auditory content.
Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element, such as images, graphical representations of text, image map regions, animations, ASCII art, graphical buttons, sounds, stand-alone audio files, audio tracks of video, and video.
- Minimize irrelevant screen information.
With age visual search skills and selective attention decline. Older adults experience difficulties in processing complex or confusing information and are more likely to experience interference from irrelevant information. Therefore, only essential information should be presented on the screen and important information should be highlighted.
Keep following our blog and very soon we will continue discussing the other web design factors in our upcoming blogs.
[...] our recent blogs ( Web Design Peculiarities for Older People (Part 1) we have already talked about the core obstacles that impair general web usability for the elderly [...]
[...] more information on designing web pages for older people you may also check our earlier blogs, Web Design Peculiarities for Older People (Part 1) and Web Design Peculiarities for Older People (Part 2). Share and [...]