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Programming

Are Software Designers Ignoring The Needs of the Elderly? (vortex.com) 205

"[A]t the very time that it's become increasingly difficult for anyone to conduct their day to day lives without using the Net, some categories of people are increasingly being treated badly by many software designers," argues long-time Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein:
The victims of these attitudes include various special needs groups — visually and/or motor impaired are just two examples — but the elderly are a particular target. Working routinely with extremely elderly persons who are very active Internet users (including in their upper 90s!), I'm particularly sensitive to the difficulties that they face keeping their Net lifelines going. Often they're working on very old computers, without the resources (financial or human) to permit them to upgrade. They may still be running very old, admittedly risky OS versions and old browsers — Windows 7 is going to be used by many for years to come, despite hitting its official "end of life" for updates a few days ago.

Yet these elderly users are increasingly dependent on the Net to pay bills (more and more firms are making alternatives increasingly difficult and in some cases expensive), to stay in touch with friends and loved ones, and for many of the other routine purposes for which all of us now routinely depend on these technologies....

There's an aspect of this that is even worse. It's attitudes! It's the attitudes of many software designers that suggest they apparently really don't care about this class of users much — or at all. They design interfaces that are difficult for these users to navigate. Or in extreme cases, they simply drop support for many of these users entirely, by eliminating functionality that permits their old systems and old browsers to function.

He cites the example of Discourse, the open source internet forum software, which recently announced they'd stop supporting Internet Explorer. Weinstein himself hates Microsoft's browser, "Yet what of the users who don't understand how to upgrade? Who don't have anyone to help them upgrade? Are we to tell them that they matter not at all?"

So he confronted Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood (who is also one of the co-founders of Discourse) on Twitter — and eventually found himself blocked.

"Far more important though than this particular case is the attitude being expressed by so many in the software community, an attitude that suggests that many highly capable software engineers don't really appreciate these users and the kinds of problems that many of these users may have, that can prevent them from making even relatively simple changes or upgrades to their systems — which they need to keep using as much as anyone — in the real world."
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Are Software Designers Ignoring The Needs of the Elderly?

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  • very likely (Score:5, Insightful)

    by liquid_schwartz ( 530085 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @12:39PM (#59635056)
    Technology as an industry prefers young people and probably defines elderly as >50, if not younger, much less what the general population considers elderly. Those who are >65 are probably considered a hopeless cause and completely ignored.
    • by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      Which is why Windows 7 is the last version that can be used by many elderly, later versions are wildly confusing to use and is not behaving in a deterministic way.

    • Re:very likely (Score:5, Insightful)

      by aergern ( 127031 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @01:56PM (#59635308)

      I'm 50. I've 2 flagship phones ... one for work and one personal. My first smartphone was a Palm. I've 2 current Macbooks and 2 enterprise level servers in my house. We're not old, we are GenX and started with TI-99s. We're not tech illiterate at all. We do however look at those younger than us and shake our heads at how arrogant folks are about this subject and how poorly their knowledge of how tech works under the UI. It's cute.

      As far as how devs think about software you'd be wrong in thinking that. I work for a company in SF (market cap of about 6 billion) and the company I work for doesn't dev with millennials and genZ'ers in mind unless you think having a primary focus on mobile is just for those under 35 ... it isn't. My elderly parents who are 76 and 80 respectively use the Net daily on their mobile devices (android phones / ipads) to do 90% of what is needed. They share a Macbook for when they absolutely have to do something that just can't be done on mobile. I introduced them to IoT devices and they love them ... mainly smart bulbs but whatever.

      The point is that perception is two steps away from assumption and the root of that is ass*u*me.

    • Re:very likely (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 2TecTom ( 311314 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @02:52PM (#59635460) Homepage Journal

      Technology as an industry prefers young people and probably defines elderly as >50, if not younger, much less what the general population considers elderly. Those who are >65 are probably considered a hopeless cause and completely ignored.

      no, not the elderly, actually the poor are the people that get left behind the most, a lot of elderly people are quite adept, meanwhile the poor, no matter how proficient, simply cannot afford access ... poverty is self-perpetuating, it's really a form of social disease

    • Technology as an industry prefers young people and probably defines elderly as >50, if not younger, much less what the general population considers elderly. Those who are >65 are probably considered a hopeless cause and completely ignored.

      No, it's defined by working devs as "My age plus ten years."

      • Like in the 60s everybody was saying "life ends at 30" and then Spencer Dryden turned 30 and Jefferson Airplane had to do the song Lather [youtu.be] to try to say, well, maybe not. (Lather was Spencer's nickname)

        In the end he made it to 66. Too young, but pretty good for 30.

  • I'm under 50 (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    and already don't understand most technology anymore
    more like i don't know what it's for

  • With two factor authentication and services dependent on phone apps the need for a smartphone is just as crippling for some older folks. I see it with my own father who well past 65.
    • With two factor authentication and services dependent on phone apps the need for a smartphone is just as crippling for some older folks. I see it with my own father who well past 65.

      Those things are a pain in the ass for me now and I'm 42.

      • They're a pain for me and I'm 34. Quite obvious that some whiz kid sold a bunch of business majors on 2fa = magic bullet...despite the fact that many of the higher profile data breaches in recent years were either inside jobs, POS hardware attacks, or some other vector that wasn't the theft or cracking of an individual privileged user's password. And now we all have to tap a zillion times on the screen just to get an ssh session going.
        • True dat! Much like retailer reactions to shoplifting, the "answer" is to focus on the trickle that comes from unwashed untrustworthy "customers" while ignoring the river that is their internal leakage.

      • Those things are a pain in the ass for me now and I'm 42.

        I'm younger than that, and I've never owned a "smart"phone. I'm not interested in being online with spying/tracking apps all the time. One of my banks uses SMS for 2FA, in addition to the usual one-time pads (either on paper or as an electronic dongle).

        I use a Chromium app for Google 2FA for the few websites that need it. I'm not sure if that counts as a 2FA when it all goes through the same browser, though.

    • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @01:37PM (#59635234)

      It's not even "the need for a smartphone", it's "the need for a somewhat recent smartphone.

      For example, you can't release software for an old iPhone 4 anymore, even though its hardware is still overkill for something like two factor authentication.

  • Their systems are so old they become extremely vulnerable to hackers and exploits, which is bad for their health and the public health of everyone else near them. It becomes an anti-vaccination argument, in which nobody wins.

    ----

    The concept of not wanting to develop for old unsupported buggy platforms is a valid concern. It takes special skill to take that concern and cloak it in a bunch of douche canoe rhetoric (assuming the entire conversation was posted).

  • It's the older generations who will cope best if the Internet ever goes down for a significant period of time (hours,days,weeks) for whatever reason. Kids these days are far too accustomed to its omniscience.

  • Yes, they probably are ignoring various groups - including the elderly. There is a lot of effort that goes into making software WORK, let alone be easy to use for people with various conditions. It is a lot harder to have stuff display properly at normal resolution or 120% zoom or even 200% zoom to support weaker vision. Backwards compatibility is overhead that you don't want to deal with. It is a pain to get everything to work correctly in all the modern browsers, and NO ONE wants to deal with making it

  • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @01:06PM (#59635126)
    I've been seeing too many websites that seem to have jumped upon the new fashion fad of light grey text on a slightly lighter-gray background. If the websites are there to convey and provide information, why intentionally hide or obscure the text required for that very purpose?
    • Hate this, it's like a horrible joke
      I was once in a fancy European hotel where everything in the room was like this. Menus, soaps, switches, phone, everything.

      These days I use the Iphone magnifier function a lot

    • They arguably fail to obey the Ontarians With Disablities Act, and may break the US equivalent.
    • > I've been seeing too many websites that seem to have jumped upon the new fashion fad of light grey text on a slightly lighter-gray background ..

      And it's difficult differentiating the clickable elements from the rest, I blame Minority Report [youtube.com]
  • Another frustration for us is the low contrast display fad. You know - dark grey type on a black background. I assume young eyes cay cope - mine can't.

    • Designers usually have expensive, calibrated displays. Normal people don't. They also just go with what they think look good (to their young eyes and calibrated displays), but they don't do any validation about the contrast.

      They need to use "contrast testing" tools, because there is standards in place for this.
      One such tool is the WebAIM Contrast Checker [webaim.org].

  • Who, again? Aren't they dead already? Do they even know what a computer IS?

    A: Me, No, Yes
    • Do they even know what a computer IS?

      Yes. As a matter of fact, we spent the 1950's and 1960's designing what you are using now.

      • This. I keep hearing, the younger people are out of our league because they grew up with the internet. And I say, uh yeah, and our generation actually created it and have used it from its inception. The latest generation only know how to use it from a surface perspective and only if it 'just works'. The older generations can do that too, because that's the easiest aspect. All the rest of what the newest users do is just a kind of 'fashion'.
    • Who, again?

      They're talking about people who know how to use email.

      A bunch of kids are reading this and thinking, "What is this idiot talking about, what is there to use? All it does is show offline notifications."

  • Linux Distro (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DeAxes ( 522822 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @01:14PM (#59635146)

    This seems like the beginnings of a Linux Distro for the Elderly. Big font, low computing requirements, either a very simplistic interface (like Apple's SimpleFinder or ChromeOS) or one mimicking Windows (like Cinnamon).
    Beyond that, most software engineers are too busy just trying to get the damn thing working. UI/UX designers do need to take account of older folks in their thinking, but often it's back-burnered because it's not their target demo.
    UI has been pretty well established for desktop, Mobile UI is only starting to become mature, but I would advise to avoid smartphones for older folks b/c of the complexity and complete disconnect from their past experiences. And Web UI is a moving target as nobody can get it right and it's always being revised day to day.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      My grandma has init shell scripts figured out. She just can't understand systemd unit files. Or why her home directory unmounts and her background processes vanish when she logs off.

    • Linux Mint has some dark modes that are helpful and Firefox plugins as well, Windows 10 not as much.

      I can tweak most desktop OS to acceptable contrast and color, its websites that suck. ALL publicly accessible commercial websites should have a disabilities friendly site option, no low contrast, no roll over popup, floatey non scalable thingys. including options for simple colors with INVERT, and TEXT SIZE choices.
      Now get off my lawn.
    • This seems like the beginnings of a Linux Distro for the Elderly.

      Ooh, ooh, pick me! This would be the "Jouncing Jitterbug" distro.

    • by Etcetera ( 14711 )

      This seems like the beginnings of a Linux Distro for the Elderly. Big font, low computing requirements, either a very simplistic interface (like Apple's SimpleFinder or ChromeOS) or one mimicking Windows (like Cinnamon).

      Although I'd like to think such, I really don't think it's appropriate for "the Elderly" as a class. Elderly tinkerers who still have all their marbles about them might benefit from better support for high-contrast, magnification, etc But the Elderly generally speaking want something that's

  • Not just elderly (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Brett Buck ( 811747 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @01:15PM (#59635150)

    "Far more important though than this particular case is the attitude being expressed by so many in the software community, an attitude that suggests that many highly capable software engineers don't really appreciate these users and the kinds of problems that many of these users may have, that can prevent them from making even relatively simple changes or upgrades to their systems â" which they need to keep using as much as anyone â" in the real world."

            It's not about the elderly per se - it's about developers continually indulging themselves in the latest and coolest trend, without regard to the consequences to anyone else. I would guess 75% of the changes I have seen over the 40 years have been involved with computing have been of any real use, or added any real value to someone who just has to use it, rather than develop for it. Of course there are wild exceptions - WYSIWYG document creation and printing*, easily-generated graphics, some of the aspects of the internet, and some aspects of social media. But, people were sending what amounted to IMs 35 years ago, email 40+ years ago, real-time control, and any technical computing task was done easily (perhaps *more* easily in some cases) 30-35 years ago. Yet we have continual "upgrades" to add trivial or unnecessary functions, lose capabilities, and add massive and serious bugs - which creates a positive feedback cycle of more "upgrades". I have use computers for a fair bit of my professional life for the last 36 years, there's nothing important that I can do now that I couldn't do in 1996 or in many cases, long before that. But that doesn't stop anyone from continually attempting to obsolete or introduce bugs trying to, for the most part, make cosmetic or trivial capabilties changes.

    No one in the SW development world sees a problem with that, but for the vast majority of the rest of us with no real interest in the guts of the systems (which is the vast majority of the world) gets much out of that, and it just ends up being a massive pain in the ass.

    Open-source is the dead worst at this - no real support, no one actually responsible to the end user for the results. Something goes wrong - post on some message board with a bunch of, in many cases, condescending assholes (right to the very top of the open source pyramid), get called a luser, or maybe dead silence.

    TFA is right - very few SW seem to care about the elderly user who doesn't want to spend their time keeping track of the latest, usually BS, unnecessary change - or anyone else of any age, either.

    *when it actually works - which, given the existence of anything past about Word 5.1 for the Mac, is pretty iffy.

    • The latest "everything flat, in pale pastel colours and no outlines" fad is an obvious example of this kind of bullshit.

      Mac OS X 10.9 is basically the last user-friendly version, from 10.10 and up you have to play the guessing game as to what is actually a button or a label. UI "designers" really need to read the book "Don't make me think", it's applicable to user interfaces as much as the web.

    • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @02:02PM (#59635320)

      It's not about the elderly per se - it's about developers continually indulging themselves in the latest and coolest trend, without regard to the consequences to anyone else. I would guess 75% of the changes I have seen over the 40 years have been involved with computing have been of any real use, or added any real value to someone who just has to use it, rather than develop for it.

      The really stupid thing is that unlike the interface to a mechanical device, software is unique in that you can have your cake and eat it too. If you want to indulge yourself with some new trend, you can. All you have to do is give the user the option to adopt your new whizbang trendy feature (like flat design UI), or stick with the old method. It takes additional space and materials to implement two interfaces in a mechanical design. But the only additional effort needed to keep around the old method as an option to a software design, is the addition of an option box. If Microsoft wanted to switch Office to a ribbon interface, they could. But all they had to do was let you revert back to the old interface with one configuration setting. Then the users could decide which interface was superior, instead of the developers deciding and mandating that everyone switch.

      You call it developers indulging themselves. But I'm increasing becoming convinced it's actually developers power tripping. It's not enough for them to come up with some new design and implement it in the software. They have to force all their users to use it in order to fully satisfy themselves.

      This is especially apparent if you look at how website design has progressed. When Berners-Lee invented the HTTP protocol, the way he envisioned it working was the site would transmit salient information (text, pictures in those days) to the browers with some suggestions on how to format it (colors, font style and color, etc). The browser would then auto-format that information in whatever format was best for it. If the browser belonged to someone with a small screen, all the info would reflow to fit the browser size. If the browser belonged to someone with a huge high-res screen, the info would expand to fill the screen (if he chose to make his browser full-screen). etc. Somewhere along the way, site designers got the power to override the user's wishes, so they could impose their own display constraints on the user. Most sites don't work anymore if you shrink the browser too small, and stop displaying additional info if you enlarge the browser past a certain size. I've even encountered one which ignored my attempts to enlarge the font. The comical thing is the need to maintain two websites (one for desktop, one for mobile browsers) is a direct result of site designers imposing too many limits on how info is displayed on the browser. The desktop site is designed to only work at a certain resolution and screen size, so displays incorrectly on mobile browsers. If they'd just stuck with the way Berners-Lee originally intended, the same site would work on both without any problems.

      In software, the designer/developer should never have the last say on UI design. That power should always belong to the user.

      • If Microsoft wanted to switch Office to a ribbon interface, they could. But all they had to do was let you revert back to the old interface with one configuration setting. Then the users could decide which interface was superior, instead of the developers deciding and mandating that everyone switch.

        Even if they did do it that way, it would have been a mistake.

        The proper way would have been to stay with the the "old" (i.e., known) interface by default and give the option to switch to this new interface. Othe

      • "even encountered one which ignored my attempts to enlarge the font"
        cough* google maps*cough

    • Well said, but I'll use the cliched short version: It's change for the sake of change, probably to justify the UI people having something to do.

      On the "older generation" theme, it's stuff like this that forced my father to stop using computers. He had trouble learning new things, but could do tasks he was used to with ease. The website he used for his email kept changing and eventually the total amount of change was so much he couldn't use the site to use email any longer.

      There are other issues out ther
  • by gaiageek ( 1070870 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @01:17PM (#59635156)
    My impression is that some programmers/designers like to make changes simply for the sake doing something "new" and "cool" to replace an "old", "tired" interface that's been around for years. What they're probably not thinking of is how much an elderly person will struggle with any changes to something they've used for years. To an elderly person who only uses their computer for checking email to keep in touch with loved ones, a seemingly benign webmail interface change can be a major hurdle, and perhaps at some point they start to give up, feeling they don't know how to do these things and can't keep up with the changes, discontinuing use of the computer and cutting the cord on one of the few things that gave them a feeling of connection with friends and family (especially younger generations, since we're not so big on using the phone). In my opinion, having or not having that feeling - that you are part of a community and that you matter - greatly affects the quality and length of the lives of the elderly.
    • by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @01:23PM (#59635190)
      Not just elderly. I'm 34. I also hate when new versions of Firefox, for example, come out every few months and the locations of menu items and config page items change places or change names seemingly every time. It costs me mental energy (read: time (read: money)) to figure it out all over again. And it makes me angry because it is blazingly obvious that the changes are not driven by any technical or even (God help me) monetization reasons but but unabashed ADHD on the part of the developers who it is also blazingly obvious never learned to respect their users (of any age) and dismiss any negative feedback with a solipsistic smokescreen of "h8rz gonna h8." See also systemd and Wayland and Gnome 3.
    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      It isn't the programmers/designers that decide on the interfaces. It's the suits who once were programmers/designers or who never were that now figure they need to change things to justify their zesting for the next position up the monkey ladder of companies.

      • Very good point. In such cases I'd suggest that the programmers/designers have a duty to fight back, citing the arguments here or others - just as long as it's not "this (interface) is how it's always been". I'm not against interface improvements, but they should build on the existing familiar interface - not completely redoing everything.
  • by Nkwe ( 604125 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @01:19PM (#59635170)
    One thing that can make things difficult for the elderly are UI changes. My dad who was a pretty smart guy - a chemical engineer by trade - was pretty set in his ways in his old age. Once he learned that to send a new email, you needed to click on the square green button in the upper left corner of the screen that was labeled "Compose", he expected it to always work that way forever. If the button color changed, if the shape of the button changed, if the location changed, or if the label changed from "Compose" to "New", it would be a significant distraction. He would eventually figure it out, but it would interrupt his flow of thought. Older people get set in their ways and software designers really should consider this. Many older folks consider technology a tool and not a toy. They want to learn how to use the tool once and then be productive. They would rather spend time being productive then relearning tools that are needlessly changing.
    • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @01:25PM (#59635192)

      A thousand times this. Unless a modification makes something much easier to use, leave the fucking UI alone. I know designers are paid to design, but look how the real world basically never changes.

      An electric car still has a steering wheel, an accelerator pedal, a brake pedal, four doors and seats. Take someone who's driven a Ford Model T and it wouldn't take them long to be able to drive a Tesla Model 3.

      This "change is good" mentality has to stop, otherwise we're collectively losing billions of man-hours trying to re-learn the same fucking shit every few years. Start with "change is bad" and think if the modification you're doing is absolutely fucking necessary.

      • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @01:55PM (#59635304)

        steering wheel, an accelerator pedal, a brake pedal, four doors and seats

        I'm still pissed about them moving the high beam switch from the floor to a stalk on the steering column. I keep getting my left foot caught in the steering wheel when I dim the headlights.

      • The Model T and Model 3 are bad examples though:

        the Ford Model T had a wildly different arrangement of controls than the current standard, including pedals for some of the gearchange actions. The Tesla Model 3 is on the other extreme, throwing away decades of standardization of minor controls in favor of a touchscreen.

        • That's true, the Model 3 is a bad example because of its stupid display/touchscreen. In that case, you can pick almost any other modern car - except Tesla and probably a few others I don't know about.

        • Edit: dashboard controls aside, though, all the basic controls really are the same: steering wheel, accelerator and brake pedals.

          I don't know which "pedals for some of the gearchange actions" you're talking about. The move from manual to automatic was one of those major welcomed change, and the move from ICE to electric completely removes gears from the equation.

          • No, the model T's basic controls are nothing like those of a modern car. Accelerator on the steering wheel, brake pedal on the right, gearchange pedals in the middle and on the left.
            It would take another decade or so for the accelerator-brake-clutch pedal arrangement to become standardized.

            Model T pedal arrangement [mtfca.com]:

            The right pedal is just like a modern car brake pedal, push that one in to stop the car. For extra safety, always keep one foot on the brake pedal, when using either other pedal. The center pedal is reverse, push that one in to make the car go backwards. The left pedal is low, neutral and high. Push that one in to make the car go in low gear. That one works with the brake lever. You should notice that pedal go in half way, when you pull the parking brake lever back all the way, if everything is properly adjusted, and your transmission will be in neutral at that point. The car is in high gear with the brake lever all the way forward and the left pedal all the way out.

            • Alright, so the Model T is out. I may have picked bad (extreme) examples, but my main point stands: nearly a century of standard accelerator/brake pedals configuration, compared to half a decade (or less!) for operating system user interfaces.

          • The move from manual to automatic was one of those major welcomed change, a

            Only by those who feel a need to eat burgers while driving.

            The rest of us know how to drive, and hate this attempt to deprive us of control of our vehicles.

      • An electric car still has a steering wheel, an accelerator pedal [...] Tesla Model 3.

        FWIW, a Tesla Model 3 is probably the worst example for your particular argument. The Tesla design team did exactly what software designers are accused of, and threw away a hundred years of design improvements and refinements in presenting information to drivers, when they replaced the dashboard with the central screen.

        Car dashboards had became more or less similar; a collection of relatively standardized display components, similar enough for drivers to easily understand most of the functionality when swit

        • I agree on Tesla's idiotic "giant touchscreen for everything" approach, but the model 3 (on the left) is even worst than the model S (on the right, with a proper dasboard above the steering wheel).
          https://www.carscoops.com/wp-c... [carscoops.com]

          But anyway, in both cases there's a lack of physical controls so I wouldn't buy a Tesla either because of that.

        • by dryeo ( 100693 )

          Unluckily, the other car manufacturers look at a Tesla and decide its the improved UI that makes it successful and follow along with a touch screen etc.
          The other reason that the interface change is popular is that it helps lock in the users to the car maker for any work that needs doing. Even something as basic as changing the battery now requires a trip to the dealer and the dealer likes it that way.

      • by sinij ( 911942 )

        A thousand times this. Unless a modification makes something much easier to use, leave the fucking UI alone. I know designers are paid to design, but look how the real world basically never changes.

        At this stage in my life I have been through multiple major UI trends (CLI, icon clusters, drop-down menu galore, ribbons, and now back to icon clusters). None of these UIs work better than others, some are easier to learn, some are easier to automate. I am convinced UI designers are paid to waste everyone's time.

    • One thing that can make things difficult for the elderly are UI changes. My dad who was a pretty smart guy - a chemical engineer by trade - was pretty set in his ways in his old age. Once he learned that to send a new email, you needed to click on the square green button in the upper left corner of the screen that was labeled "Compose", he expected it to always work that way forever. If the button color changed, if the shape of the button changed, if the location changed, or if the label changed from "Compose" to "New", it would be a significant distraction. He would eventually figure it out, but it would interrupt his flow of thought. Older people get set in their ways and software designers really should consider this. Many older folks consider technology a tool and not a toy. They want to learn how to use the tool once and then be productive. They would rather spend time being productive then relearning tools that are needlessly changing.

      I learned Excel on version 2007, I think. I could do nearly any operation possible using keyboard shortcuts. I wasn't even close to elderly when but it annoyed (and still does) me to no end when they changed, in some cases removed, the shortcut combinations for many of my commonly used operations. I've just stopped using shortcuts with Excel, and stopped using Excel when possible.

    • This applies not just to the elderly. Change for the sake of change is surprisingly common in software. Whenever you change a tool, and how to accomplish tasks with it, you affect everyone's productivity at least until they re-learn the new way, and sometimes the new UI looks "cooler" but is actually less efficient to use - I blame the latter on some designers never actually considering the user experience of their product, just that it looks sleek - "oh look, I made these buttons nice and monochrome tiny,

  • I have to increase the font size twice, otherwise the text is just ridiculously tiny.

    • The slashdot mobile version is definitely not elderly/poor vision friendly.

      My eyesight is pretty good still. I need reading glasses from time to time for small text as well as when contrast is poor.

      I go to reason magazine on my smartphone and I do not need the reading glasses.
      I go to zerohedge on my smartphone and I do not need the reading glasses.
      I go to slashdot on my smartphone and holy fuck I can barely read anything without the reading glasses.
      • I'm not even talking about the mobile version, I need to increase the font twice for the regular, desktop version of the website (slashdot.org)

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by flex941 ( 521675 )
        buy a bigger (same resolution, physically bigger) screen. seriously. slashdot is very fine on a desktop.
  • Apparently deaf people complain that porn doesn't have the subtitles required by law.

  • All us grey neck beards...
    Oh never mind

  • For example if my mom saw one of those scam "you're infected with a virus" ads she'd panic. My dad was told to enter his phone number to get the results of something and they of course made a huge charge to his phone bill. My uncle's Facebook account was social engineered by a link from one of his hacked friends. Leave things unpatched and they'll get id thieves and crypto-viruses and whatnot else. For most everything else I'm just like don't change a winning team, if the old way works for you we'll keep do

  • by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @01:33PM (#59635220) Journal

    I've thought a LOT about these issues over the years, as I've worked in such areas as doing on-site paid computer support (often for the elderly), and even in corporate I.T. as some of our staff ages and struggles with every change we make.

    The problem, of course, is that technology keeps changing and advancing, pretty much as rapidly as the changes can be coded and finalized. A whole lot of existing code turns out to be incredibly insecure from recently discovered ways to hack or hijack it. And that, alone, causes a lot of software to receive updates that disable some of the backwards compatibility.

    I think the operating system developers have done a pretty commendable job of recognizing that OS wide support is needed for a lot of physical impairments. Apple, especially, has done a lot to make a Mac more user-friendly for the blind or the partially sight-impaired, as well as for the hard of hearing or for those with challenges with fine motor skills. And Microsoft has jumped on that bandwagon too with more recent Windows versions. But none of that really helps if the user is still running a very old operating system on obsolete hardware. Plus, a big part of this gripe seems to be about things like font and color scheme choices made by web site developers -- so outside the scope of how preferences are set on the local machine itself. (You can do certain things like automatically displaying higher contrast colors when the original ones on a page aren't a good fit for a sight impairment ... but we're still back to not having those capabilities on really old operating systems.)

    The single biggest thing I've seen with modern tech that really keeps some of the elderly out is the trend towards touch-screen displays as the interfaces on phones. So many older people carry a flip phone (often a model with oversized number keys on it), because using an Android or an iPhone is just too challenging for them. I've tried and tried to teach my wife's mom to use an iPhone. And to a very limited extent, she can get around an iPad we gave her, just to play a few games on it that she likes. But the smaller screen on the phone, coupled with so many places you have to drag things with a finger just right and let go at the right place and time just makes it too hard for her to navigate it without making too many mistakes. I get accidental phone calls from her many times a day if my number is in her contacts list on it, for example.) But as soon as you use a flip phone today, you cut yourself off from so many things -- including new vehicles that use a smartphone app to let you remote start the car, set the climate control on it, or check results of a diagnostic test it does via OnStar or a similar service. Some auto insurance companies will deny you discounted rates if you don't drive for several months with a smartphone in the car, running their app that analyzes how you drive. And let's not even get started with struggles sending text messages from a flip phone. They wind up using them as phones and little else, so they lose out on all the "computer in your pocket" benefits we assume everyone has today.

    • "Apple, especially, has done a lot to make a Mac more user-friendly for the blind or the partially sight-impaired, as well as for the hard of hearing or for those with challenges with fine motor skills"

      That's nice, however anyone who's had to invoke Apple's special key combinations knows they won't be pressable by everyone. For example, try pressing Cmd-Option-R-P with one hand.

      • Thumb on the right [command]+[option] keys, little finger on [R], index finger on [P].

        Not sure what this is supposed to do though, it's not assigned to anything on my old 2010 Mac mini.

        • Its logical enough: Ctrl-R-P turns you Mac into a Raspberry Pi.
        • by King_TJ ( 85913 )

          That key combo is for Apple's "PRAM reset". They tell you to hold those keys down right as the machine is first powered on, until you hear it "chime" a second time, to clear some stored settings back to factory defaults. (The PRAM stores such things as Mac sleep settings and the preferred volume settings that were last used... a number of random things that can cause a Mac to act oddly or even refuse to boot properly at all if they're somehow set to corrupt/invalid values.)

          These days, it's pretty rare you

  • Everything today is designed for and only for spectacularly incompetent and lazy people. Whether it comes natural due to being old, or just as a way of iLife.

    Just look at modern OSes.
    You can't even use the damn computer as a computer anymore, because it's all locked-down and oversimplified to the point where you can't even make it do an action for an entire list anymore! Where Clippy's offspring block you from going to system directories, seeing file name extensions, picking your own settings, looks, automa

  • Microsoft knows they can't upgrade it as it would break the millions of corporate web pages, yet it is also used by people who don't know anything better exists. I think Microsoft should take the IE user interface and embed the Chromium engine in it instead similar to how Chrome Frame worked, and have the compatibility mode button load using Trident. That way people get the old interface but able to access modern sites. Since Microsoft Edge is a failure I think Microsoft should take advantage of the greater
  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @01:45PM (#59635266)

    I'm not that old yet, but my eyes are not as good as they used to me.

    Even from just this slight fading of ability, I notice a lot of things have fonts that are way too small for people with reduced vision. Every app I feel like should either support something like system dynamic text to control size, or support some way in the app to opt for some kind of larger text size.

    Just recently I was trying to log into some new app, and they had a CAPTCHA image that was literally unreadable to me. I think it took about 40 iterations before I saw something I was able to guess at and guess right. So if your app is using a CAPTCHA (hint: it should not be) then for the love of god at least make it giant and readable so an actual human has a chance.

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  • It costs money and time to include special support for the elderly. When a company is building new software, they are going for the 80/20 rule, supporting the 80% of people with 20% of the effort. If the work is successful enough, support for special needs groups can be added, but this is expensive. So yes, they do ignore the elderly (at first), but I don't fault them for this.

  • Ever thinner and smaller devices can be extremely difficult for the elderly to use. My step-father, who worked full time as a food and beverage manager well into his seventies, found it impossible to use a touch screen phone.

  • There will more boomers hitting this age bracket now or soon who are in this boat. (FWIW, I am on the cusp of boomer and genx, and work in software... so might be good for another year or two :D). Anyway, that is a huge market. Seems rather stupid to ignore.
  • I know some elderly people who won't even go to certain parts of their town now because of the traffic circles. The cognitive load of merging in and out of one of those Thunderdomes is significantly higher than for traffic lights.
    Heck, in my town, the traffic "engineers" created a couple of circles that are so small that they are non-functional. They are basically uncontrolled intersections with islands in the middle, which is fine in low-traffic neighborhood back streets, but not on the periphery of a boo

  • by r2kordmaa ( 1163933 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @02:34PM (#59635404)
    Something is severely misunderstood here, nobody develops software for the needs of the users, software is developed for the needs of the developer, the payday specifically in most cases. Or in case of open source - for the fun of it. Nobody goes out of their way to develop crap for MS-DOS because some diehards somewhere just can't let it go. If these people want new software to work on their outdated systems they can very well pay for it, because the economics to offer "free" software to them are no longer there.
  • geez, I was a geek before that was a word, wrote my first code in fortran, batch processing, time sharing was not yet affordable for my university, started with slide rules, worked through calculators, computer kits and my first IBM 5150 PC and I've never looked back

    all along the way I've encountered fellow technophiles, some people got it, others never will

  • Software designers ignore the needs of everyone. For example, who in their right mind would remove a thin black line from around a window such that when said window is situated over something white (such as a blank document), you don't know where the window is to drag to a new location?

    As we've seen from the software designers at Mozilla (and elsewhere), what people want or need is completely irrelevant. Designers know what you need and you'll use it whether you like it or not.

    Allowing software designers t

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Fringe ( 6096 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @03:20PM (#59635544)

    Lauren is out of touch. The following is a true story. Even the names have not been changed to protect the innocent.

    • Many years ago, I was the lead engineer on a product, an expensive medical device, designed to detect life-threatening seizures in infants (<2 years old) at least ten minutes ahead of time. This product was demonstrated to be a significant life-saver.
    • Developing it, without the regulator, testing and FDA costs, was incredibly expensive and took around five years. It started from a theory, had to be measured, tested, vetted, etc.
    • Add regulatory requirements, the price triples. No lie. Need many clinical studies, and those aren't cheap. Need all sorts of immersion, RF, etc. tests. Nothing is ever cheap.
    • Okay, we get approval. Our BOM is around $1000, but to recoup the previous half-decade, we need to price it around $10,000/unit, because there isn't scale to recover otherwise. Okay, WTF is the point? Dev is expensive. So????
    • In a forum (GrokLaw, anyone remember that?), a contributor slammed the idea that necessary medical devices should be patent-protected, because lives depend on it. And she villified me, because us selling our potentially life-saving device for $10K would put, at least for a few years (prices always come down over time as the costs are paid off), children at risk.

    Okay, let's cover some other basics. I have a stellar background in volunteer and contributory work, including over a decade in Special Olympics. But this #$!+ doesn't matter to some self-centered enraged FN snowflake. All that matters is, it turned out, that her child was "at risk."

    This isn't that different. If you hit the sweet spot, yeah, we support you. If you need a Braille Reader, or Simple English (created by the BBC for global shortwave, so don't attack me), or something encoded in colors... yeah, not in our commercial MVP. And it shouldn't be. If you insist that every product, at introduction, cater to every demographic, you will stifle innovation. Especially if you insist I cover every F'in gender. [weebly.com] Do you want a dynamic economy and society, or do you want the thought police destroying anyone thinking out-side the box and able to innovate?

    The thing about "exclusion" is it invariably leads to "inclusion", as the market picks up the stragglers. Everyone is looking for a niche, or a few more customers. The elderly are actually handled... I see ads focusing on them for a variety of tech in print magazines. But Laurent doesn't read print, Lauren is an anti-Luddite... if it isn't in Twitter, it didn't exist. And Lauren's weak, self-focused, "I am the universe" view would destroy innovation. You owe it to the Universe to destroy Lauren before he destroys us!!!

    Caveat: Since Lauren has not successfully picked his own left nostril without encurring red-eye, Lauren probably does not pose a significant danger to the Universe. Or the city. Or the house. Or anything other than his unfortunately-located left-eye.

  • by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @03:34PM (#59635576)

    I may be one of the world's oldest digital natives, having been in IT since my first year of college in 1965, but I see a common problem with fellow chrono-Americans who were raised in office environments where they were taught administrative procedures that consist of writing down every step of their machine interactions in detail. This frees them from the need to have the slightest understanding of what the system is doing, but at the same time sends them completely up a tree if any step in the procedure changes. Because they have no idea that CTRL-A means select all items in a set while CTRL-C copies the current selection, they are lost if they need to do something like deselect two items in a select-all list before doing the next step, or if knowing that they could avoid two hours of manual labor in a subsequent step by CTRL-V pasting the items they just CTRL-C'ed.

  • Coders do what they're told. They can suggest a feature, which then has to be approved by who knows how many people, which will add some cost, possibly very little, but some.
  • ...and to hell with the rest. Even when you are 30 years old, you are seen as long in the tooth when it comes to most programming jobs. Funny /. posted an article a couple days back saying that we are hitting the physical limits of hardware growth and that we will need to return to tight, efficent code. Can most 25 year olds handle that? I think not.
  • I use a laptop from 2012. So that is, Uh, 8 years old this year. It runs everything I ask it to run, no problems.

    I am sorry, it if people are still running hardware older than what I have, too bad for them. They should put a crowbar in their wallet and upgrade.

  • “As it stands right now, Ubuntu is making use of Orca [softpedia.com], the accessibility component from the GNOME stack”
  • by NormAtHome ( 99305 ) on Sunday January 19, 2020 @07:04PM (#59635948)

    My mother who's now legally blind and has been losing her sight for the last 15 years is having so many problems with software on Windows 10, the web and her phone that she hardly uses them anymore. Her eye condition also makes her colorblind and certain popular color schemes on websites make it impossible for her to read i.e. white text on a blue or red background just appears as a uniform shade of gray and Bank Of America is one of the biggest offenders. Likewise Quicken which she's been using since the late 1990's has very little support for changing font sizes and colors and the last two versions have lost almost all support or don't work well with screen readers. I've worked on trying to get her to use the Windows Magnifier, tried display scaling and any number of other things and most of the programs she uses just don't seem to work well with any of those things.

    It seems to me that no one cares or want to invest in making applications, websites and phones specifically for people who are visually impaired and I've taken her to a special center for the visually impaired and the various solutions they've offered are so hard to use that they're practically worthless. And it also seems to me that many websites and applications vendors (such as Intuit) are in violation of the Americans with disabilities act by failing to offer a version of the website or application that's in black and white only or giving the option for a theme that's B&W only.

  • Good article.
  • What's elderly unfriendly? Hiding menus and function buttons behind esoteric icons that people need to memorize. My dad can't. It's like working with a damn goldfish. Tell him that three horizontal lines or three vertical dots is a menu, and that information is completely gone the moment he's clicked on the thing he's looking for. The start menu was once the word start, and now is a nameless icon. Programs once had a ubiquitous "File Edit View Help" menu, and no matter what you were in, the steps to print, save, copy, paste, find, open help, etc were the exact same. Now the only consistency is keyboard shortcuts, which of course (goldfish memory!) he can't remember either, so he now has a list of keyboard shortcuts next to the computer. Yes, a handwritten list of key combinations was the only solution to the shit inconsistency UIs have devolved into.

Programmers do it bit by bit.

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