Despite difficulties in using the Web, older adults are motivated to use it. This paper reports on work underway to ease Web access for this population. Although Web accessibility standards provide specifications that Web content providers must incorporate if their pages are to be accessible, these standards do not guarantee a good experience for all Web users. This paper will discuss user controls that make a number of dynamic adaptations to page presentation and input that can greatly increase the usability of Web pages for older users. The paper will discuss the authors' original work on the topic, lessons learned, and usage patterns. Current extensions to that work are also discussed.
This paper reviews several techniques we have discovered while trying to extend the Firefox browser to support people with visual, motor, reading, and cognitive disabilities. Our goal throughout has been to find ways to make on-the-fly transformations of Web content including adjustments of text and image size, text style, line and letter spacing, text foreground color, text background color, page background removal, content linearization, and reading text aloud. In this paper, we focus primarily on the changes we make to the browser's Document Object Model (DOM) to transform Web content. We review the kinds of approaches we have used to make DOM modifications sufficiently fast and error free. We highlight the problems posed by Web pages with a mix of static and dynamic content generated by client-side scripts and by Web pages that use both fixed and relative placement of page elements, pages of the sort we expect to see in increasingly in the future.
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