Effective Online Mapping and Map Viewer Design for the Senior Population

Abstract

Geographical information is connected to everyday life in many ways. Web cartography has made geospatial data more available to the public. In the next few years, the average age of the population will be over 51 years, with more than 15% of the population over the age of 65 years. The fact that the senior population is increasing suggests that online mapping and map viewer design should be aware of the senior population's visual restrictions, as well as restrictions of other potential map users, including colour-vision-impaired users. This paper describes the senior population's visual restrictions that can be compared with colour-vision-impaired users and provides guidelines with regard to online mapping and map viewer design for this growing segment of the elderly population.

Drawing metro maps in concentric circles: A designer‐in‐the‐loop approach with visual examples

“…This article presents a proof-of-concept designer-in-the-loop schematic map drawing tool, with the focus on the concentric circle style in transportation studies (schematic map is also known as linear cartogram in cartography studies). Closely related to everyday life, transportation, as a field of studying everyday mobilities of people, information, and goods, has long been a field that arouses the interest of academics and professionals working in various forms of (geo)visualization and digitalization of the complex realities and problems (Brovelli et al, 2017;Mobasheri et al, 2017aMobasheri et al, , 2017bMobasheri et al, , 2020Roth, 2021;Vrenko & Petrovič, 2015), apart from well-thought-out quantitative models and simulations. For many if not most of these academics and education professionals, visualization has always been an important tool for people to convey and verify the known, explore the unknown, and convey ideas that cannot be easily expressed in writing but can be readily translated into (geo)visuals or non-verbal representations (Carbonell-Carrera & Hess-Medler, 2019;Edsall & Wentz, 2007;MacEachren, 1991;Sun & Li, 2010).…”