Designing Sites For Older Web Surfers

That's a good point, Tim. I think this is one aspect of accessibility that people don't tend to consider. These are people who are firstly more likely to have moderate disabilities (like poor eyesight or hand coordination) and also are more likely to be very uncomfrotable with technology.

So this means that things need to be very very simple and very very clear. This is also one of the reasons why I'm always harping on about tiny text. Many of us young web designers tend to take our own abilities and technical capabilities for granted and don't consider that our audience might not be like us in many ways.

Of course, as always, I think any accessibility improvement is an improvement for all users, regarless of age or ability.

Quote: I just read an article on (ahem) another web site.

Are you hanging around ********* Tim? I think I will have to ticket you for that. You of all people...

Anyways, if I were targeting older users I would use images rarely because you can't resize text in images. That's about it for me, besides what Megan said about text sizes.

ive been putting up text resize options for the longest time (if I can)... My thought was that more paying customers come from the higher age group and would generally have poor eye-sight... also there is this problem that even bigger texts appear way huge in lower resolutions and smaller in reverse.

Just make sure you have proper css resize, or put fonts in the ranges of 12px to 16px... noticed that game sites really like to use 10px, since their demographic is quite young... Thats my take on it...

Well, I think px shouldn't be used as a font size anyway. Either the em or the pt should be used. However, having said that, even the point shouldn't be used because it won't resize in IE.

Therefore, by the process of elimination, ems should be used to specify font size.

Having the resize option in my opinion is just a bells and whistle thing.
An aged viewer would have their browser font size increased to view big text as default, if still not big enough they use those maginfy screen thingys in front of the screen, so making the sites text bigger by a resize option would make it massive - couple words a line

At the very least they know you try to made the site with them in mind, wether they use it or not, they have that option incase they do want to change it on the fly... Adding a few lines to accomodate something YOU think may not be useful to some is not an excuse not to make it work for them, like saying since 90% of your visitors are fro IE doesnt mean you want it to work only for IE and to heck with the other browsers, I still do extensive checks to make sure it does work...

Check out this article http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4853000.stm

EDIT: Old news, I didn't see this thread already on the forum http://www.webmaster-forums.net/showthread.php?p=196351#post196351

The other thing to keep in mind with text resizing is that the layout has to still work if the fonts are made much bigger. I think the best thing for people who need a lot of help here are some of the accessibility layouts in Opera. That would be better than trying to sort through visual formatting.

Text resizers shouldn't be necessary unless you're assuming that people would have an easier time finding that, on your site, than finding the text resize controls in their browser. I'm not sure which would be more likely. I wonder if older web surfers would recognize buttons like that and know what they mean. it could be better to actually use text instead of an icon. "Make text bigger".

Actuallly, that could be another thing to consider - that older users might not recognize icons or terms that you take for granted...

Yeah good point megan, I usually hire someone to proof read, and check if a word is for a certain demographic understandable or not, but its not fool-proof. As for text resize, I Use Full words, always assume that the user dont exactly understand a thing about your site, make it work as though the person doesnt have english as a native language, just try to make it work for as many demographic as possible... at the very least try to put an effort on it...