Designing Websites for Disabled / Elderly?

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?"

Comments

US Govt Section 508

[pease1]

US Government websites have to conform to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Sounds sort of silly, but it ensures that US govt sites are accessible to all, including the disabled and elderly. You can learn more here. You will find some nice guidelines to follow, save some time and have some evidence to back you up.

Some govt webmasters wine about this, but it's really a good thing, given that all should be able to access govt data.

WCAG

[JimDabell]

The W3C (the people behind the HTML, HTTP and CSS specifications) have published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines for exactly this situation.

The most sensible methodology is to write basic, meaningful HTML, and then use CSS, Javascript, images, etc where they will add to the value of the website where you can do so without constructing barriers for certain groups of people. For the most part, HTML is already accessible, and it takes screw-ups to make it inaccessible. Unfortunately, the types of screw-ups that make websites inaccessible are very common (things like leaving out alt attributes on images, trying to fix font sizes, etc).

As for it being aesthetically pleasing, accessible websites don't have to be boring, but if you have to choose one or the other (you rarely do), wouldn't it be better that somebody could actually use a website, rather than it being a pretty-looking, but ultimately useless toy?

Large text and contrasting colors

[Unholy_Kingfish]

My father is 59, very bad eyes from diabetes, didn't start using a computer until 2 years ago. Observing him, and dealing with his problems, has shown me that simple is the best. Keep the eye candy on the screen to a minimum. Use fonts like Arial which have clean lines. Make sure the text and background contrast very well. Give them a clean black text on white background, over a blue text on gray background. Use basic colors, no light yellow, light gray, ect ect.

As far as structure. Simple Simple Simple. Big bold headers. Big separators. Lots of CLICK HERE links. Most people miss the mouseovers and don't really understand hyperlinking. And make those mouseovers VERY different. Invert the colors of the link when there is a mouseover event. Lastly, aim for 800x600, no bigger. My father uses XP at 8x6 on a 19" monitor and it is too small for him.