In 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 and have discussed what should be taken into account when writing the content of your website. In this blog we will speak about the color and font considerations in web design that are worth to be paid attention to.

1. Color

Elderly people experience a reduction in the transmission of blue light, have more trouble sorting or matching colors, and make more errors in the short wavelength and blue-green regions than in the other color regions. To make effective color choices, web design specialists need to know the three perceptual attributes of color: hue, lightness and saturation. When choosing color combinations, consider colors that do have differences in all three of these areas to provide maximum legibility.

• Choose complementary colors:

Use color wheel to arrange the colors of the spectrum by hue. Choosing colors from the opposite sides of the color wheel is recommended.

• Avoid some colors:

Colors that are exceptionally fluorescent, bright, or vibrant can have edges that appear to blur and create after-images, which tire the eyes.

• Maximize the contrast between background and foreground colors:

To maximize contrast, always use dark types on light or white backgrounds in your website design, and avoid using colors of similar lightness adjacent to one another. It is good practice to choose dark colors with hues from the bottom half of the color wheel against light colors from the top half of the circle. Also, be aware that people with color deficits will see less contrast between colors. So it helps to even lighten light colors and darken dark colors.

2. Font

• Choose fonts by legibility:

To ease reading, choose fonts based on their legibility, and avoid using several types of fonts mixed together or very narrow or decorative fonts. Keeping to the most basic and common fonts may not seem very exciting, but it ensures that what you design is exactly what the users see. Drop shadows on text, often used to give words the appearance of depth, can also be difficult to decipher.

• Use at least 12-point size:

Larger font type is easier to read. For most seniors, twelve to fourteen point fonts are the optimal choice for body while headlines and titles are typically two points larger. Those with partial sight may require a 16 point font or above.

• Use relative sizes:

Use relative font size in your website design, don’t use any coding that will limit users’ ability to set his or her own font, font size, or colors. Ensure this applies to both navigation and content elements on your website. When a user enlarges a Web page, text images, including logos, banners and buttons are not enlarged with the rest of the text on a page. So avoid using them or make them initially larger. Also, be aware of navigation bars and other crucial elements that cannot be resized.

• Type weight:

Many typefaces are available in light, narrow, bold, or extra bold. While boldfaced text may appear larger, its readability is poor. Use bold only to emphasise a title or a key word.

• Don’t use all capital letters:

Using all capital letters decreases readability. While sometimes used for web design purposes, it tends to lead to higher levels of eyestrain and eye fatigue because there is too little differentiation between the letters, and the eye does not get a visual breather. At best, only use capital letters for key words or titles. Capitalise the first letter of each word in a heading instead of all of it, although bold type is recommended as a more effective alternative.

Tags: Web Design, website design

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 1:02 am and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.