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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: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday November 23 2019, @07:41AM (1 child)
I always control-mouseroll and change the font size when I run into these pages. Doesn't do anything for TIAA-CREF's site, which I still have to scroll down because all of it is large-font notices at the top and a crapload of whitespace. How about, I dunno, multiple items on one line and serifs? Or greasemonkey scripts/tuned-CSS repository and 'Grumpy-olds' browser plugin (?) to drop those in automatically for common websites?
I see a few classes of people here:
I see the tech-savvy olds possibly being the best, last, and only line of defense in this area. I mean, can you point to anyone else who's going to take up these causes?
What all of us have run into, though, is 2560/4k laptops and monitors where you're saying, "That's text, right? I think that's text. Or maybe it's a scratch on the screen. Where's the mouse pointer?" when Linux brings up the X server at the default resolution. For those of us who don't live our lives on our phones, this is probably more important to us, as websites will probably auto-adjust eventually.
(Score: 1) by Samantha Wright on Sunday November 24 2019, @10:44PM
The example you mentioned (TIAA [tiaa.org]) is a lot better than you think, and seems to have some deliberate ADA compliance embedded in it. Under Firefox, hit View > Page Style > No Style; a very thoughtful "skip to main content" link will take you past the somewhat-broken oversized SVG elements in the navigation and to what I suspect is a format you'd find quite bearable. Ironically, this works much poorly on TFA, as there are giant embedded SVG elements within the post's body itself.
But instead of worrying about specific examples, I'd like you to consider looking at this problem from a different angle, which is one of deliberate (albeit usually semi-unconscious) discrimination against older users—or more specifically, the generation that is currently ageing. In English-speaking countries, anyone who hadn't graduated high school at the turn of the millennium was reaching maturity in a time and place where many public and authority figures were making unforgivably self-serving, avaricious, and cynical decisions about how to govern, and the younger generation witnessed profound apathy or even enthusiasm for the lies, lobbying, and excuses that were made to justify these actions, many of which sabotaged the hard-earned lessons and accomplishments of previous generations—and a lot of that continues to this day. The resulting perception isn't that elders in general should be disrespected, but almost the opposite: that the Baby Boom generation disrespected their environment and their ancestors, and that their legacy is one that needs to be tip-toed around, if not outright undone.
So, when creating a website, who do the designers keep in mind as stakeholders? Well, it's not going to be the group of people responsible for every single incident of corruption that's occurred during their lifetimes, that's for sure. If anything that's a group of people to proactively exclude, a sentiment captured by the phrase "OK, boomer [wikipedia.org]," and reinforced every time it's invoked by kids who only log into Facebook because they have to; kids who would much rather be elsewhere, with people they can relate to. So as far as meeting accessibility standards goes, you can expect to see a slight bias in attention paid to accessibility features that don't benefit the elderly, such as addressing reduced mobility, options to accommodate colour-blindness and colour-deficient vision, and braille interfaces.
Otherwise, it's best to expect UI-based discrimination to be deliberately employed as a filter, and I wouldn't expect an outpouring of sympathy from the digital natives any time soon.