The interesting thing about digital technology is that it can help older adults perhaps even more than it can help everybody else who's younger. You get quotes like these: 'A Mac laptop opened the world to me right here from my kitchen table. This is a blessing because my mobility is now extremely limited due to my physical disability.' Or someone else said, 'I can keep in touch with people all over the world. I feel so connected to so much of the world, art, music, nature, comedy, humanity.
Technology has helped me move 19 times in nine years.' That only works if the digital technology is easy for older adults to use. If it isn't, you get comments like these: 'How can I make the font bigger? I can't see it.'; 'I wish they'd stop changing things.'; 'All the new technology is so confusing to me.'; 'Who thought thin gray letters was a good idea?'; 'So much to remember.'
And the kinds of things that *can cause problems* for older adults are: illegible text, passwords that you can't remember, lost objects, hard-to-solve CAPTHCAs, mysterious icons and symbols, small targets, confusing navigation, not understanding where the focus is on the screen. So, these are the kinds of problems that older adults can face. And guess what? Younger adults face some of these problems, too. The other thing to say is that *everyone is impaired at least some of the time*.
Even young people can have trouble in certain situations. So, for example, suppose you're on a bus and you're trying to text your friend, and the bus is driving over a bumpy road, and suddenly that gives you hand tremors. So, maybe it would be nice to have a design ... where it didn't matter whether you had hand tremors or not;
you know – you could use voice dictation, for example, on your phone.