Older Adult Problems: Vision

One of the common ailments for elderly adults is vision problems. How does this affect their use of computers? Often, older adults wear bi-focals or tri-focals which can make it difficult for them to focus from the keyboard to the screen or visa-versa.  There is also the challenge of viewing the information on the screen due to glare and trouble reading large amounts of small text (Bean, 2003).

This is an example of a user friend website for seniors:

http://nihseniorhealth.gov/

You can see here that the text is large and readable. Links are plainly visible being in blue and underlined. The user is not overwhelmed with the amount of information, and the sections of text are short and to the point. There is also an easy to spot tool to increase the size of the text.

Here is an example of a website that is not senior friendly:

This site from the New York Times is not highly colored (which can make things difficult) but there is a lot of text that is clustered together. The menu to the left has text that is even smaller and would be hard to read. There is also no tool to adjust the site’s text.

This website outlines ideas that site creators might want to follow when creating a website.

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-usability/older-users.shtml

Things like: keeping the site simple, making it plain if the pages requires scrolling, keeping language basic, and keeping the look simple. 

Additional Source:

Bean, C. (2003). Meeting the challenge: Training an aging population to use computers. Southeastern Librarian 51(3).