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Needs for older users
[Editor's DRAFT - 23 July 2008]

 Introduction

The literature review is intended to provide a needs compilation and comparison, by reviewing and comparing differences and similarities between the technical and outreach needs of people with accessibility needs due to ageing, and the technical and outreach needs of people with disabilities, with regard to Web accessibility. The current 14th May draft has collected and commented on a wide range of literature; the discussion below is an initial analysis of this material identifying the needs of older users and the overlap with WCAG and identifying additional issues brought out by various authors and investigators.

Analysis of the various published ‘senior friendly’ guidelines and the research studies into older Web users has identified a number of needs that are commonly recommended. Some of these mirror or overlap the WCAG 1.0 Checkpoints, others are more closely related to traditional usability

Observations

Many of the recommendations, especially from the 'senior friendly' sets of recommendations, closely mirrored WACG 1.0 Checkpoints even though few of the authors referenced WAI or WACG 1.0. However, in general these recommendations did not mirror the more technical Checkpoints reflecting the fact that most studies worked with older users who were not disabled, or were not acknowledging their disability and utilising adaptive strategies or assistive technologies.

Three documents analyse the requirements form the various studies collected for the literature review:

• WCAG 1.0 checkpoints – mapping to ageing recommendations
• Additional requirements suggested by ageing recommendations
• Requirements identified from targeted studies

A further analysis of references within the seven evidence or research based sets of comprehensive recommendations reinforced one of our initial hypotheses that a lot of repetition has occurred in this space, with very little referencing of WCAG 1.0 as already stated, and similar low levels of cross referencing.

From the three requirements collections a number of needs were commonly identified by many studies. The following clearly stand out:

• Provision of clear navigation mechanisms (much of Guideline 13 was reflected)
• Ensure documents are clear and simple (much of Guideline 14 was reflected)
• Contrast was identified as an issue, matching the observation that most people lose contrast acuity as they get older (Checkpoint 2.2); some specific colour watch-points also emerged
• Movement on the page was discouraged - especially scrolling text (Checkpoint 7.3)
• Font selection should be from the san serif family, and should be a minimum of 12pt in size. While WCAG promotes relative units, maybe a minimum size in ems or '%' should be recommended to accommodate the declining vision of most older users.
• Text should be left justified and free from embellishments such as all capitals, italics, underlining or drop shadows.
• Pop-ups and new windows were discouraged as causing confusion and disabling the 'back button'
• Link presentation was recommended to be large, and to reflect the conventional underlined blue display
• Clarity of forms and clear instructions
• User testing was encouraged by many authors

Additional needs were identified by some authors, but this collection seems to be the most prevelent.

 

File (not necessarily content) last updated on $Date: 2008/07/24 08:47:47 $ by $Author: andrew $

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