Older Adults Accessibility Issue 4: Movement

Posted by Paul Crichton on 27 June 2017.

“When a website has a lot of stuff moving around, I leave it. It is too distracting.”

Of all the changes we go through as we get older, cognitive changes are most complex and have the most variation between individuals. Some aspects get weaker, some remain the same, and some actually improve.

One thing that does generally get worse is our ability to concentrate, and not become easily distracted. Probably the most common complaint from all our interviewees regarded adverts, pop-ups and changing carousels. All these things have one thing in common – they distract the user from the task that they are attempting to complete.

Does your website have a problem?

Review your website and look for automated movement on any pages. Things like adverts, pop-ups and carousels that could be distracting to users. Unless the control linking to an embedded video explicitly tells the user what to expect, make sure that it doesn’t start playing when the page loads.

Tip

Carousels are always a tempting tool to squeeze extra information onto a page. There is plenty of research that shows that they aren’t as effective as most stakeholders hope, but if you have to have one, then make it manual rather than automatic. If even that isn’t possible, then provide a control to make sure that users can pause or stop it.

How to make things better

Make sure that movement on a page is limited, and that it serves a purpose that helps the user, rather than just adding decoration to a web page.

Back to introduction

Next: Older adult accessibility issue 5: Peripheral Vision

 

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