Accessibility and usability issues when designing websites for older computer users

As a part of my final year university project I am designing a social networking website targeted mainly to older users. I was wondering what accessibility and usability issues should be taken into account when creating a website for such users, apart from obvio开发者_C百科us ones - such as bigger font, compatibility with current standards, straight-forward interface. Or maybe an older user is just the same as an average user and no special design is needed? Let me know what you think. Thanks.

A tip is: don't guess.

Follow guidelines and heuristics, but qualitative interviews and observations is how you get measurable results.

The equation old = inexperience should not be expected to be true at all times. Here's an excerpt out of official stats for "internet users of the age 55-74 who used internet 'as good as every day' for the last three months" from Sweden with approx 9M inhabitants.

2003    2004    2005    2006    2007    2008    2009

388942  652547  665746  760719  718911  950045 993000

My point is this, if you end up guessing, be well informed. It's all about users, if you generalize you'll likely be punished for it (think of a 60 year old feeling younger than ever, faced with large fonts on your webpage when she's used to facebook...)

On a sidenote: there seems to be a lot of good references in Web Accessibility for Older Users: A Literature Review over at w3.org

It's difficult to make a list and say these things work and these things don't. When dealing with an older and/or less tech savvy crowd, your interface must be very intuitive. If your users can't figure out how to use it quickly, they won't. While that's easy to say, it's a lot more difficult to do. You should start by talking with users if you haven't already - is it something they want? Do they have specific features they want?

When designing, it would be great if you could have a few prototypical users to review your project along the way. You don't want to build an entire site only to find out it doesn't work right for the users. Incremental changes and focus groups with users should help you.

http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/

High contrast (black and white vs. shades of gray) might be a good idea.

Voice recognition might be a good idea, too.

Other than that, appropriate how-to videos may fill the gap. Making necessary multi-step processes clear ("just show me what to do") is a good idea for any age group.