Re: Nielsen-Norman Studies on Children & Seniors

For those people* who have little experience or understanding of the
problems facing people with learning difficulties, here are a few
educational links.

http://www.brainpop.com/ has excellent health films, science technology and
maths are also covered, they may not be fully accessible.....

http://www.hwlc.ac.uk/lweb/logon/Resources/computer/whole2.htm an educators
attempt to help one log on.

http://www.hwlc.ac.uk/lweb/gardening/keygarden.htm from the same stable, a
national award winning site on gardening.

http://www.hwlc.ac.uk/lweb/gardening/keygarden.htm our attempt to show what
we do, and place our students on the web.

all of these are informative, and none are remotely related to the
'entertainment industry'

It is essential that more information is provided in a suitable form for our
users, and educators are not necessarily the best able.
In the meantime, we are obliged to use what resources there are, that are
already available.

A serious study of the peepo site will provide numerous other example,
possibly more than over half the available links.
We expect to expand this dramatically over the coming years.

All of this is not to deny that w3c is probably less able to lobby the
games, and entertainment industries, and this is both a great pity, and
needs our attention.

thanks

Jonathan Chetwynd
peepo project manager

* David wrote:
>This is one of the things that concerns me about the "learning
difficulties"
> lobby.  They go in for the "keeping their attention" things, but is the
result
> really that they can use the site any better for anything except
entertainment




----- Original Message -----
From: "David Woolley" <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Saturday, April 20, 2002 11:49 AM
Subject: Re: Nielsen-Norman Studies on Children & Seniors


> The Australian URL gives "cannot connect to host", but..
>
> > computer, so tend to work with older tech; they are frustrated by more
> > complex site designs; adding sound & animation tends to keep their
attention.
>
> This is one of the things that concerns me about the "learning
difficulties"
> lobby.  They go in for the "keeping their attention" things, but is the
result
> really that they can use the site any better for anything except
entertainment
> (possibly by the attention grabbing features).  (To a large extent, I
think
> that lobby is about providing entertainment to people who are not of
> interest to the commercial entertainment industry (don't spend with their
> advertisers), rather than giving them better access in an information
> society.)
>
> One point from the alertbox was the high vulnerabilty of children to
> advertising.  This is put across as a failure, but to the extent that
> the sites are there for children, and those children have parents who
> can afford things, it means that such sites could be the most successful
> in their real business aims.
>
> My impression from trying to teach elderly relatives basic computer use
> is that the biggest killer is creative user interfaces.  They will try to
> write down a 1 page summary of how to use the machine, but, if every site
> has different user interface conventions (what I call "hunt the links",
> and which is hinted at in the alertbox by the reference to mine sweeping),
> you cannot construct a 1 page summary of how to use the weh, even though
> you could do for simple HTML plus two or three higher level conventions.
>
> Elderly (and I think that includes non-computer people of my age (49))
> users will not mine sweep; they are too afraid of breaking things by
> doing things that they don't clearly understand in advance.
>
> I'm not so certain of one other point, but I think that many elderly users
> would be put off by cartoons, etc. and treat the site as condescending to
> them.
>
>

Received on Saturday, 20 April 2002 13:47:09 UTC