E-government visual accessibility for older adult users

The web offers an unprecedented opportunity to gain immediate access to government resources that might not otherwise be available to many older adults aged 60 years and over. Yet due to aging vision, there remain design barriers to the use of state and federal government web sites. This research describes aging vision and its impact on the accessibility of government web sites. It incorporates the guidelines published by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) for making senior-friendly web sites. Several software tools, including Dottie and Usability Enforcer, are described in terms of their functionality in promoting senior-friendly web sites. Data generated by the software tools and manual assessment are used to evaluate e-government compliance with vision-related NIA accessibility guidelines.