Tablet for the elderly. Part one

If you ask yourself the question of who on Earth was not involved in the IT mainstream, then people of poor remote areas, for example, most African countries, the Himalayas and the Russian hinterland, come to mind first. In fairly developed areas, at first glance, everything is fine: computers, tablets, smartphones, gadgets, the Internet - all this is abundant.

However, the existing abundance can take advantage of not all: even in developed countries there are many people who are deprived of the attention of IT manufacturers. I mean older people and people with disabilities: there are a lot of IT products designed for young people, for children, for middle-aged people — games, social networks, information resources, business applications — but very few products that take into account the needs and limitations of the elderly and people with disabilities.

I first encountered this, deciding to equip my grandmother with modern digital devices that could facilitate and brighten her life. By this time, my grandmother was more than ninety, she could hardly move, she did not go out into the street, and she sat on the bed almost all the time. Its main activities consisted in watching on TV pre-selected and tagged movies and TV shows, as well as reading newspapers and books. However, over the years, hearing and eyesight have deteriorated, fingers have become worse to obey. Regarding the television programs, she said: “They are vaguely talking. I can hear everything, but I can't make out the words! ” The television remote control did not always work the way she wanted: she didn’t manage to briefly and briefly press the keys. She had read books and newspapers with very strong glasses, and later with a magnifying glass. And all this in a state of absolutely clear mind and beautiful memory.
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The problem with vague speakers and actors was partially solved with the help of wireless headphones. The Pocketbook e-book was bought for reading, in which we installed a large font, and for listening to audio recordings - music, audio books and radio shows - the Sony NWZ-B152F mp3 player, minimally sophisticated and easy to manage, was chosen.

It is appropriate to mention here that my grandmother knew Japanese and English, in the past she served in intelligence, and then for decades taught linguistics at the university. With age, she progressed only physical weakness, and her intellectual activity and interest in life did not weaken, so we had no doubt that she would easily master the simple rules for using the book and the player. We simply and intelligibly showed her how to handle the devices, and calmed down.

It turned out - in vain. It turned out that grandma, for example, was absolutely alien to the obvious file storage system in the hierarchical system of nested folders. Accordingly, she every time had difficulty finding the right book on a Pocketbook or audio recordings on an mp3 player. In addition, we immediately faced with the fact that for the grandmother were not natural and do not understand the generally accepted principles of movement in the tree-menu nowadays. When we said to her: “In this case, you need to take a step back,” then we met her sincere misunderstanding: “Where to go back?”. For her, "back" - quite naturally - could only mean "back in space" or "back in time", and "back on the menu" remained some kind of incomprehensible combination of clear words. Thus, the general principles of information storage and device management were not perceived by it, and we had to draw on a piece of paper several diagrams reflecting the sequence of actions for searching a book or audio file, and each time my grandmother checked this piece of paper to get to a particular file. Under these conditions, it became absolutely clear that with the control of more complex devices - a laptop or tablet - the grandmother could not cope with exactly, so the photos and videos of the great-great grandson she could only watch when we brought her the laptop and opened the necessary files on it.

I was interested in the question of what is the basis of these difficulties with the use of modern electronic devices, whether all older people are faced with such difficulties, and whether it is possible to buy such a gadget that would be easily managed by the elderly. In short, the answers to these questions are:
1. Yes, this is a common problem of the overwhelming number of older people.
2. No, there is no such electronic device that takes into account the basic age limit.

Problems with the use of modern devices in older people arise precisely because of the large number of fundamental limitations that are a consequence of old age. I will mention only some of them:

Ability	Age restrictions
Vision
Color vision	The difficulty of distinguishing certain wavelengths, in particular blue-green
Visual selection	The difficulty of extracting relevant information on the screen, which has both relevant and non-relevant information
Hearing
Hearing frequency range	Decreased sensitivity to high frequencies
Hearing selection	Decreased ability to separate speech from background noise
Recognition
Spatial visualization	Reduced ability to store and operate spatial representations in working memory
Episodic memory	Impairment of explicit memory related to certain events and their context. Slower acquisition of new knowledge
Semantic and procedural memory	Previously acquired general knowledge and skills are applied well. The acquisition of new skills is slower.
Motion control
Fine motor regulation	Decreased ability to manipulate very small controls

Accordingly, there are a number of recommendations on how to take into account age limits in interfaces. Here are some of them:
• use sans serif type fonts;
• use uppercase and lowercase letters, avoid using capitalized text;
• avoid using a number of similar colors or a pair of blue-green;
• increase the size of peripheral elements;
• avoid multicolumn text and frames;
• provide positive evidence of action;
• avoid scrolling (in particular, in the drop-down menus) and up-down keys.

So, the problem exists, it is known and to some extent investigated. In the next post I will write about how this problem is solved.