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from the You-May-Be-Younger,-But-I-Have-Better-Insurance dept.
(Disclaimer: I wrote the article Creating Online Environments That Work Well For Older Users but suspect that many Soylentils will find it useful.)
A significant part of the Internet-using population is aged 50 or older — including the people who invented it. Web designers need to understand what older users need and why it's not enough to just say, "I can read it, so what's the problem?"
If you're my age you have no doubt run into more than a few web sites that are just plain useless, either because you can't read the text, or because they were designed using assumptions that those of us over forty years of age don't find useful. Whether it's our need for high contrast text, or our preference for actual words and paragraphs over video, the needs of older users often get ignored.
We are the generation that invented and grew up with personal computers. It's absurd to suggest that we are less capable of using technology. In other words, you can't complain about old people not understanding tech, and then also complain that they've taken over Facebook and Twitter. Besides, we also usually have lots more disposable income, so catering to our needs is good for business.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Saturday November 23 2019, @05:00AM (4 children)
Backgrounds that interfere with text readability are *so* annoying. Usually I just don't bother.
Once in a while I'll copy the text into an emacs window and read it there.
For a lot of other stuff, ctrl-+ is my friend.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Saturday November 23 2019, @05:21AM (2 children)
There are so many sites that violate the ADA people could probably make a living just suing them (while also creating the social good of forcing websites not to discriminate against older people and the disabled). They won't change until it costs more in penalties than it costs to comply with the law. Fines nowadays are considered a cost of doing business, and getting away with bad behaviour is seen by many as proof of machismo.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Saturday November 23 2019, @05:26AM (1 child)
Which is why I primarily use my mobile device as a *phone*. Shocking, I know.
I will occasionally use it for web browsing, but only when I can't get to a device with a keyboard/mouse.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday November 24 2019, @04:54AM
yep -- I use my phone for browser stuff as an absolute last resort only when immediately necessary -- often times I'll think "oh I should look into X" and when I get home or back to my office, I'll fire up a browser and do the search.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Saturday November 23 2019, @11:52AM
What you do is why I think older tech folks have an advantage over the young'uns. They don't know how to adjust for such road bumps, but we've always had to as we built the stuff from scratch. When I encounter issues like you mentioned, if uMatrix doesn't nuke it automatically then I open firebug and nuke it there. I recall a few years ago running into an annoyance with spiegel.de where they blurred everything out behind a paywall. I started to write a plugin to get rid of it, discovered somebody else had already done that, popped theirs in and it was off to the races.
For all other cases, there's always Lynx. I love Lynx. It's a balm whenever my annoyance with designers is piqued.
Washington DC delenda est.