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Sunday, April 28, 2002 |
"Seniors are one of the fastest growing demographics on the Web. The United States alone has an estimated 4.2 million Internet users over the age of 65. Indeed, all industrialized countries have huge populations of senior citizens, many of whom have substantial assets. Although they are typically retired, seniors lead very active lives and often have great interest in modern technologies such as the Internet, which gives them another method to communicate and stay informed.
In our study, email was the main Internet application used by seniors.... Normalizing the usability metrics so that the seniors' scores are the baseline value of 100% in all cases leads to an estimated overall usability of 222% for non-seniors. (Averaging computed as the geometric mean.) In other words, overall usability was slightly more than twice as good for non-seniors as it was for seniors....
Websites tend to be produced by young designers, who often assume that all users have perfect vision and motor control, and know everything about the Web. These assumptions rarely hold, even when the users are not seniors. However, as indicated by our usability metrics, seniors are hurt more by usability problems than younger users. Among the obvious physical attributes often affected by the human aging process are eyesight, precision of movement, and memory....
The most widely known principle for supporting seniors' computer use is to support larger font sizes than those younger users prefer. The principle may be well known, and it was indeed confirmed by our study, but still, it is frequently violated by sites that freeze text at a tiny font size.
Sites that target seniors should use at least 12-point type as the default. And all sites, whether or not they specifically target seniors, should let users increase text size as desired -- especially if the site opts for a smaller default font size.
For hypertext links, large text is especially important for two main reasons: 1) to ensure readability of these essential design components, and 2) to make them more prominent targets for clicking. You should also avoid tightly clustered links that are not separated by white space. Doing so will decrease erroneous clicks and increase the speed at which users hit the correct link. This rule also applies to command buttons and other interaction objects, all of which need to be reasonably large to be easy to click.
Pull-down menus, hierarchically walking menus, and other moving interface elements cause problems for seniors who are not always steady with the mouse. Better to use static user interface widgets and designs that do not require pixel-perfect pointing....
When websites violate the guideline to use different colors to clearly distinguish between visited and unvisited links, seniors easily lose track of where they have been. We've certainly seen the same problem among all age groups: It's confusing when websites change the standard link colors, and it's particularly confusing when the same color is used for all links, whether or not you have visited the destination page. However, seniors have a harder time remembering which parts of a website they have visited before, so they are more likely to waste time repeatedly returning to the same place.
Seniors also have a harder time using unforgiving search engines and forms. We saw users thwarted because they typed hyphens in their search queries, and punished because they used hyphens or parentheses in a telephone or credit card number." [UseIt.com Alertbox]
These are all very important things for library web designers to remember. I learned about online fonts the wrong way, so I will NOT be using pixels when I re-design the Homer Library site. If your site has the text links tucked away at the bottom of the page in small text, you might want to reconsider that decision and at least enlarge the font size.
11:00:32 PM Permanent link here
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"If you spend any time at all writing on the web in text boxes and you use IE, then your gonna love ieSpell. It will spell check any text box for you, like the ones i use in MovableType. Very cool and worth the download." [...useless miscellany]
In return for her gracious notes on Gator, I wanted to post this one for masu so that she can download it May 1st, when the account will hopefully be unfrozen. And Eric, I couldn't find an alternate download site, either. :-
10:38:37 PM Permanent link here
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"Shoppers headed for the West Seattle Thriftway Wednesday can leave their credit cards, debit cards and checks at home. They just need to make sure to bring their index fingers.
The supermarket will be the first in Washington and one of the first in the nation to use a biometrics system -- finger scanning -- to tie consumers to their credit cards, electronic benefit cards and checking accounts, says the maker of the system, Indivos of Oakland, Calif.
'The main thing is, it's fast, it's easy, and it's secure,' says Paul Kapioski, West Seattle Thriftway owner.
Consumers enroll in the system by putting their index finger on an image reader, which runs digital information for 13 points on the finger through a formula, and stores the encrypted information on Indivos servers. Consumers register whichever cards or accounts they want associated with their finger scan.
'It takes about one minute to enroll,' Kapioski said. Enrollment begins Wednesday and is strictly voluntary, he emphasized. Wary customers still will be able to pay the old-fashioned way if they want.
Once enrolled, consumers won't need to hassle with their wallets or purses. Instead, they'll just pass their fingers over the image reader." [Seattle Post-Intelligencer, via Slashdot]
10:27:50 PM Permanent link here
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"Infineon's Emerging Technologies Group has developed chips, sensors and packages that allow the processors to be woven into fabrics. Special materials woven into the fabric are used to connect the chips and sensors....
'The further evolution of our information society will make everyday electronic applications ever more invisible and natural," said Sönke Mehrgardt, Infineon's chief technology officer, in a statement. "The enabling technologies we presented today are a major step toward this objective.'
A wide range of companies are researching wearable electronics and so-called plastic chips, which could lead to flat screens that consumers can fold, intelligent labels, cheap solar cells and a plethora of other devices....
Infineon has developed a prototype MP3 player that can be sewn directly into shirts or jackets. The player, consisting of a chip, a removable battery/data storage card and a flexible keyboard, includes an earpiece for listening to music.
Infineon will show off an MP3 player "jacket" at Avantex, a kind of fashion show for high-tech textiles, next month in Frankfurt.
The company also said that similar wearable chips could create clothing used in medical applications to monitor patients' vital signs.
These applications would use tiny chips, which convert a person's body heat into electrical energy, to store information or transmit data wirelessly via a built-in antenna." [ZDNet News]
Will you be able to download an album to your jacket? Could you read an ebook on your sleeve? How would we ever stop students from cheating when calculators are embedded in their shirts?
8:23:55 PM Permanent link here
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"Now automakers have developed voluntary standards to try to limit how much the gadgets interfere with driving. Safety advocates say the guidelines do not go far enough and they want the federal government to come up with rules.
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers developed 23 principles for the installation and design of 'telematics' — electronics and communications that provide guidance and information to drivers. The guidelines, which the alliance sent this week to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, call for systems that present information without interfering with safe driving.
For example, new technologies should not block the driver’s view or get in the way of other vehicle controls. The driver should be able to complete tasks with brief glances. Sounds should not be so loud they mask warnings inside or outside the vehicle.
Vann Wilber, the alliance’s director of vehicle safety, said gadgets that comply with the standards should be in vehicles within three to five years." [MSNBC]
They should outlaw putting on lipstick, reading, using a comb or hairbrush, and changing clothes while driving, too.
7:57:02 PM Permanent link here
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"This gigantic room full of books was indispensable to our civilization, and this one person was indispensable to this particular room of books. To me, that seemed like a lot of responsibility without a lot of fanfare. As I spent the rest of the weekend listening to the jargon-addled ramblings of "important" academics and the slippery slick poses of high-paid confidence men, that seemed like just the tonic. I began the application process to library school within a week.
What I never expected was the camaraderie. I knew that being a law librarian would provide an environment where I could grow intellectually, where I could be a part of something more important than a single person and, I was soon to discover, a profession where I'd probably never want for work opportunities. I just never expected to like so many of the people I work with. And that started as soon as I was introduced to the field....
Spending the bulk of my time at the reference desk has enhanced my education by at least a factor of 10. While my classes are certainly valuable, they are only intermittently -- and sometimes, accidentally -- so. But every time I'm on the reference desk I'm learning something that will come up again. Whether it's explaining to first-year law students the value of West's Digest or carefully navigating the Sargasso Sea of the patent process with a pro se patron without actually giving legal advice, it is all worth my time. After the excitement I felt having just completed an attenuated session of tracking down an obscure Australian treaty, I told a colleague that working the reference desk is like a never-ending Mensa tryout but without all the people in turtleneck sweaters.
I suspect there will come a time when I'm not so sanguine about the idea of spending so much time on the reference desk ... and I bet it will have something to do with legislative histories. But I'm not there yet. Right now I feel very fortunate to get paid to spend my days in a library trying to figure out legal problems without actually having to figure out legal problems. If someone had told me at the beginning of law school that there was a job where I could work on legal matters, where I would be encouraged to research and publish, but where I wouldn't spend my evenings wondering if I'd done enough with my days, I wouldn't have believed them." [Law.com, via Virtual Acquisition Shelf & News Desk]
Ernie will appreciate this one.
3:03:04 PM Permanent link here
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© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
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