Towards mobile accessibility for older people: A user centered evaluation

Abstract

As people age, they experience a decline in a wide variety of their abilities such as vision, hearing, mobility and so on. Mobile technologies could be used to improve their quality of life in a wide set of situations such as security, autonomy or personal communication. One of the main threats in the use of mobile devices by our elders is the accessibility barriers that exist on the devices and mobile applications. Unfortunately, addressing these issues is even harder in new devices like smartphones or tablets where there is not a proper set of guidelines focusing on this domain. Based on our own set of accessibility guidelines, an accessibility evaluation of two mobile applications with elderly involvement has been carried out in this work. The outcomes support the suitability of the set of accessibility guidelines proposed as a method to evaluate; on the other hand the data collected from the study with users provide interesting findings about the perception of the older users when they interacting with mobile applications. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.