The W3C have recently released a draft literature review of web accessibility for older users. The paper makes for interesting reading for anyone designing web sites with a broad demographic or specifically for older users.

Whilst the paper questions what is an older user, it doesn’t come to a clear conclusion but indicates that it is any one over the age of 60. Exploring the number of users online over this age indicates that whilst the number of internet users declines steadily as age increases, there is still quite a large number of users in the older demographic.

The key is that web designers and businesses ignoring older users when designing their sites, run the risk of alienating an important section of their customer base.

Visit: http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-wai-age-literature-20080514/ to read the full paper.

Web Design

Website usability guru Jakob Nielson has announced his latest formula to calculate how much people read online. His latest research into web users online reading habit shows that the average web users only spends sufficient time on an average web page to read maximum 28% of it.

The research shows that as the word count of page content increases the percentage actually read decreases at a sharp rate. Users only read half the information on pages with 111 words or less.

The article concludes that for majority of businesses with broad readerships, that they keep their word counts on a strict diet.

To read the full article visit: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html.

Online Marketing