Interface Support for Elderly People with Impaired Sight or Memory

In an information society for all, everyone must have equal access to information in order to function effectively. Those that are unable to access vital information, which is increasingly distributed via the Internet, will become marginalised within society. Elderly people using computers, and hence Internet browsers, for the first time are faced with new ways of thinking and have little experience to draw from. In order to map the task in hand onto a set of tools that will support it, the user must have a strong conceptual model of the underlying system and the dimensions of the task. Users must also remember sequences of events to build up strategies for the computer use. Impairment of short-term memory causes problems in developing conceptual models at the interface and in developing strategies for software use. This paper addresses the challenges faced by elderly visually impaired people, with poor memories, using the internet to access information. It reports the results of experimentation with a talking interface to help elderly users get up and running on the Internet. The talking interface is a special enhancement of the web browser for visually impaired users called BrookesTalk. Issues of personal support, menu selection, understanding of synthetic speech and memory modeling are also discussed.