ABSTRACT
Often guidelines make very general suggestions which relate to very broad categories of disability or ageing. For example, the Sony (1998) guidelines state that “consistent aural cues should be produced in response to operations”, which is clearly important and useful for all users who lack vision to see a display. (For simplicity and generality, this chapter will use the term display to refer to any presentation of information from an ICT-whether that is a computer or mobile phone screen, the display on an information kiosk or a public transport ticket machine.) However, it does not give the designer much information about how best to design the aural cues and what consistency means. In addition, it is probably more helpful for people using an ICT without vision at all, as it does not lead the designer to think about the different ways that users may have partial vision, the different kinds of visual and auditory information they are likely to be able to perceive and how best to use those capabilities to the full. The other problem with sets of guidelines is that it is not usually clear whether they have covered the full range of disabilities and/or effects of
ageing. For example, Spiezle (1999) presents his guidelines for Web design for older users in categories relating to components of Web pages-layout, style, colour, etc. While this is undoubtedly useful for designers when actually working on a specific problem, it does little to increase their understanding of the problems which older Web users actually have. In terms of assessing whether this is an adequate and comprehensive set of guidelines, it is not clear whether all the problems that older users have have been addressed (e.g., older people tend to process cognitively new information more slowly than younger people, which would seem to have interesting implications for Web design, but it is not clear where that would be dealt with in these guidelines).
