According to a survey by a British telecom regulator, reported by the BBC, just over a quarter of people over 65 have home internet access. This pales in comparison to younger age groups.
How does this finding affect web designers and organizations that use the web as a primary medium of information delivery? Though we cannot put more computers in the homes of others ourselves, we can strive to make the web experiences they have easier. Two key points of the survey was that many groups new to the Internet are intimidated by it, and do not believe that it is worth their time to learn how to interact with it.
Both of these issues can be mediated by solid design principles. When it comes to making a website more accessible to those groups that are not heavy users, intuitive designs are more important that edgy ones, even conventional ones.
Defy Convention
For example, any typical Internet user knows to click on a logo in the top-left of a webpage to get to the main homepage. This is due to convention, and is meaningless to someone with little Internet experience. A button clearly labeled “Home” will be of better use.
Text size is another area where groups may be marginalized. More and more websites are providing a large or small font selection on their pages, but why force a user to choose the larger size on every different site they visit. A user with impaired vision will have their browser set to a larger font size, and it is up to the designers to provide relative rather than absolute font sizes in their style sheets. The challenge is to create designs which will still be aesthetic with font sizes larger than 8 or 9 pixels.
Where to go from here...
The greater challenge is to create content and services which will draw previously excluded groups to the Internet because they feel there is value for them. Hopefully that challenge will be met by those groups themselves and one by one more people of every type join the online community.
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