Abstract. Smartphones with touchscreen-based interfaces are increasingly used by non-technical groups including the elderly. However, application developers have little understanding of how senior users interact with their products and of how to design senior-friendly interfaces. As an initial study to assess standard mobile touchscreen interfaces for the elderly, we conducted performance measurements and observational evaluations of 20 elderly participants. The tasks included performing basic gestures such as taps, drags, and pinching motions and using basic interactive components such as software keyboards and photo viewers. We found that mobile touchscreens were generally easy for the elderly to use and a week's experience generally improved their proficiency. However, careful observations identified several typical problems that should be addressed in future interfaces. We discuss the implications of our experiments, seeking to provide informal guidelines for application developers to design better interfaces for elderly people.

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Various accessibility activities are improving blind access to the increasingly indispensable WWW. These approaches use various metrics to measure the Web's accessibility. “Ease of navigation” (navigability) is one of the crucial factors for blind usability, especially for complicated webpages used in portals and online shopping sites. However, it is difficult for automatic checking tools to evaluate the navigation capabilities even for a single webpage. Navigability issues for complete Web applications are still far beyond their capabilities. This study aims at obtaining quantitative results about the current accessibility status of real world Web applications, and analyzes real users' behavior on such websites. In Study 1, an automatic analysis method for webpage navigability is introduced, and then a broad survey using this method for 30 international online shopping sites is described. The next study (Study 2) focuses on a fine-grained analysis of real users' behavior on some of these online shopping sites. We modified a voice browser to record each user's actions and the information presented to that user. We conducted user testing on existing sites with this tool. We also developed an analysis and visualization method for the recorded information. The results showed us that users strongly depend on scanning navigation instead of logical navigation. A landmark-oriented navigation model was proposed based on the results. Finally, we discuss future possibilities for improving navigability, including proposals for voice browsers.

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These days, Web authors try to describe as much information as possible in one page using various types of visual effects. This information is visually fragmented into groupings. Blind users read the Web contents in tag order, but visually fragmented groupings are not accessible using tag order reading. In addition, the Web contents are designed to be visually appealing using a lot of images. This style makes nonvisual Web access harder. Therefore we decided to develop an annotation-based transcoding system to convert already-existing Web pages to be accessible, which works between a Web server and a user. It consists of two components, one for structural annotations and one for commentary annotations. Structural annotations are used to recognize visually fragmented groupings as well as to show the importance and basic role of each group. Commentary annotations are used to give users a useful description of each grouping. In this paper, we will describe our transcoding method for nonvisual Web access based on the annotations.