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Kara Pernice, If everybody built websites that followed the World Wide Web Consortium's standards for creating accessible websites, would this also cover any potential problems that older users, who are now using the internet, face or are there other considerations that need to be factored in?
Asked by shanas2077 on Oct 25 2007 7:52:00 PM and supported by 39 members
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Answer

I think we could add a few more things to it. To be quite honest, I’m not familiar with every single guideline that the W3C is proposing today so I might mention some things that are on this list but I recall there were things like – when you’re thinking about a senior, what I try to do is to think about all the more severe usability issues that people have, or accessibility challenges I suppose, and then work back from there to issues similar to those but not as severe. A senior might not actually be blind but he may have lower vision. He might not even have severe low vision – he might still be able to drive a car but he has a little low vision or his memory is just decreasing a little bit or his motor skills…if you have arthritis you aren’t going to have the exact same problems as a person who has cerebral palsy but you are going to have a little bit of that problem. For example, the proximity of button, having a button that relates to a command be close to it so a person doesn’t really have to work to move across what can be a very long place, which is a web page! If you have trouble moving a mouse, it can feel like running a marathon. And contrast is something we all of course know about. And things like links – making links that actually look like links I think is very important and helping to distinguish what is a link and not a link. I think mostly for seniors though is to just try and make the websites incredibly easy to use and to focus more on the problems I see new users having. So I think there are more things we can do. The real point is do something that isn’t as expensive as some people think it is, which is do some basic usability studies with seniors, watch them use your website. If you’re not already doing that, you’re going to learn so much. And they’re fun too! Those are my favourite studies, studies with older people, because when you finish the studies they break out the stories and start to talk like human beings and they’re really cool people a lot of them. I mean sure there are some crotchety ones, like there can be mean young people and mean old people, but a lot of the older people have some very interesting stories to tell and it makes it a lot of fun. MORE!

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