Re: Old Age and Accessibility

> - they were more likely to click non-link items (i.e. bullets, headings, 
> icons, etc. but sometimes didn't click even when they saw the "hand" 
> indicating that something was a link)

I would say this was a consequence of the way that links are hidden.  I
don't think they would have any problem if links always looked the same,
but pages often hide links in several different ways on the same page,
so people who are not experienced web page users resort to hunt the link
tactics.  I suspect this could even happen if you used the standard link
presentation and only that, because they will have been taught by other
pages that almost anything can be a link, but not learned the level of
detail needed to reverse engineer the design to actually predict which
really are links.

> - older users were slower to click and more cautious about clicking
> - older users spend more time reading text and instructions

These are both symptoms of a fear of doing things wrong.

(Note that you seem to have started from the assumption that such people
know how to use Windows.  Some may at the lower end of your age range,
but most won't at the high end.)

Received on Tuesday, 30 September 2003 02:42:54 UTC