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Designing Websites for Disabled / Elderly?

Posted by Cliff on from the keeping-things-neat-and-organized dept.

dangerz asks: "I'm in a class right now that gives you a client and you must design a site for them for free. My class was split up into a group, and I am the Project Manager / Lead Programmer in the group. Our client is a group for Disabled and Elderly People. Basically, what we need to do is create a site for them to sell their art work. We had a meeting with the board of the organization today where we explained the basics of a website and what we'd need from them to move on. They learned pretty quick, but there are some things they want that we think aren't aesthetically pleasing. Has anyone ever had to do a site where the target audience was elderly or disabled people, and if so, what steps did you take to make sure everything was simple and accessible?"

3 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Why design site by site for the disabled? by linzeal · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Can't we make adequetely advanced software on their end to interpret any site instead of consigning them to only a select few tailored to them?

    --
    An Education is the Font of All Liberty
    1. Re:Why design site by site for the disabled? by JimDabell · · Score: 1, Insightful

      That would involve some pretty spectacular artificial intelligence. When authors of websites don't know what they are doing, and instead of marking up headings as such, they choose to put them in a different colour or something, how is a user-agent supposed to understand the change in context and relay that to the user where colour is not available, for instance?

      It's a problem similar to optical character recognition, except you aren't just recognising a finite set of glyphs, but trying to extract meaning from a particular picture. In other words, it's a hell of a lot easier to kick up a fuss when somebody screws up a website (HTML starts out accessible for the most part) than inventing whole new AI techniques to cope with code monkey incompetence.

    2. Re:Why design site by site for the disabled? by driptray · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Congratulations, you've just described a web browser.

      The issue is whether web designers use a sufficiently flexible design so that it allows end-users can incorporate their own style-sheets etc. to make the site just right for them.

      IOW, one site that can appear in many different ways depending on the browser settings. All modern browsers can already do this.