Website Accessibility and Your Senior Audience

The World Wide Web Consortium defines website accessibility to mean the inclusive practice of design and development so that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate and interact with and contribute to the web. In 2019, the web has become an indispensable part of our day-to-day lives, underscoring the importance of why we need to do our best in making the web accessible to all users including Seniors.  It is assumed that web accessibility is really just for people with disabilities, but that’s a common misconception. In reality, improving web accessibility for people with disabilities improves everyone’s experience. Specifically looking at a senior audience, we need to be sure to make adjustments for their vision, physical ability, hearing and cognitive ability. As we age, our vision declines, making it more difficult to read and see images on a website. Our dexterity decreases making it difficult to tap and click buttons and links accurately. We experience more trouble hearing, changing the experience of watching a video online. Our cognitive ability changes, we might have a harder time concentrating, have difficulty following navigation and finding information on a website. And we become more easily overwhelmed by pop-ups, automatically rotating image carousels and webpages overloaded with content. With a few design tweaks, you can tackle some of these obstacles on your website to make it more friendly towards your Senior users. Here’s a quick guide to get you started: Getting started with web accessibility Text Ensure you are using a font that is readable. When in doubt, stick to a popular sans serif webfont such as Arial, Helvetica, Open Sans or similar. Make sure you choose a text color that contrasts well with the background. There are a few websites that can help you check such as Accessible Colors. Avoid putting text in images. If you do, make sure to put a solid color behind the text and include the text in...