Experimental study of Web browsing accessibility for elderly people

DOI Web Site 4 Citations
  • KOBAYASHI Daiji
    Faculty of Human Cultural Science and Business Administrations, Nihonbashi Gakkan University
  • TAKAHASHI Yuichi
    Department of Management Science, Faculty of Engineering, Graduate School of Tokyo University of Science
  • YAMAMOTO Sakae
    Department of Management Science, Faculty of Engineering, Tokyo University of Science

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Other Title
  • 高齢者のウェブ・アクセシビリティに関する実験的研究
  • コウレイシャ ノ ウェブ アクセシビリティ ニ カンスル ジッケンテキ ケンキュウ

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Japan is the country with the largest percentage of its population over 65 years of age. Most of them lack sufficient information about the facilities available to them to make their life as comfortableas it could be. Much of this information, from both public and private sources about such things as health care, social insurance and other services is available on the Internet.Although nearly 20% of Japanese people in the 65+ age bracket have Internet access, they find itdifficult to extract the information they require. The problem is therefore two fold : one, to give the opportunity for more to have Internet access and two, to improve the accessibility to the informationit contains. This study reveals the problems elderly people have with Web browsing and consider the solutions to make their information gathering tasks easier and more efficient.In order to investigate the difficulties experienced by users of Internet devices, the following investigations were carried out in a Japanese Internet environment. Firstly, computer mouse manipulation was observed using a notebook computer and an optical computer mouse. Secondly,since elderly people find it difficult to co-ordinate button clicks with the position of the pointer in the correct hypertext location, the factors affecting the difficulty of mouse operation were researched through further experimentation. Lastly, the other elderly participants tried to find a hypertext location target that was shown across the top or bottom or down the left or right sides of the screenusing three different font sizes. In these experiments, their performance was recorded as mouseevents using custom software on the notebook computer.From these results, the mouse operating techniques of elderly people became clear. These techniques did not provide sufficiently reliable mouse operation for successful Web browsing.Therefore, we developed a Web accessibility tool which made their mouse operation more reliable.The 3 functions of the Web accessibility tool are the followings:● Moving the mouse pointer into the correct hypertext location on the screen,● Enlarging the click area,● Accepting commands of the left mouse button only.Effectiveness of the accessibility tool was evaluated through the verification experiment. From the results, the effectiveness of the accessibility tool reducing the Web browsing difficulty for elderly people was clarified.

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