The harm in conflating aging with accessibility

Abstract

Including older adults as full stakeholders in digital society.

How Age and Gender Affect the Opinions of Computing Students Regarding Computer Usage and Design Needs

“…With respect to older people, "(T)he narrow focus on accessibility concerns harms older adults by excluding them from wider benefits of technologies" [85] (p. 67). It is important that systems are also useful and acceptable for them.…”

Personal Narratives in Technology Design: The Value of Sharing Older Adults’ Stories in the Design of Social Robots

“…Older adults' stories and speculative scenarios negate the negative stereotypes identified in the stories, instead supporting that older adults have an interest in new technologies (including robots) and consistently use technology in their daily lives even when challenges arise. Echoing Knowles et al (2020), our work supports and advocates for empowering older adults to be a part of the design process and leveraging narratives around positive aging as design inspiration. This is very necessary within the humanrobot interaction (HRI) community as Lee and Riek (2018) emphasize that assistive technologies designed through the deficit model of aging (instead of one of positive aging) can amplify ageism in society due to HRI researchers' bias or unexamined assumptions.…”

“…Within society, the dominant narratives around aging have primarily been viewed through a deficit model of aging (Cruikshank, 2013;Katz, 2000;Lamb, 2014;Lazar et al, 2017;Lee and Riek, 2018;Vines et al, 2013Vines et al, , 2015. Researchers have highlighted the harm that comes from associating aging as an illness or disability, including promoting ageism and contributing to the othering of older adults (Knowles et al, 2020). Our analysis suggests that combining storytelling and co-design when working with older adults can champion a shift to a more positive narrative of aging that demonstrates wisdom and other values of lived experiences (Dychtwald, 2012;Levy, 2017).…”

AFFORCE: Actionable Framework for Designing Crowdsourcing Experiences for Older Adults

“…This is a common problem with the feedback (6) and training (5) module, as well as impact (7) measures and follow-up information on the performance and importance of completed tasks, and quite a challenge, when it comes to user empowerment (8) -a necessary step when working with older adults using technology [16,25]. The platform (1) may also be custom-built, and there was some success with crowdsourcing platforms designed with older adults in mind, especially with co-design [13,16], which accounted for such aspects as familiarity with the interfaces [26], to help bridge the digital divide, and cater to the characteristic motivation and strengths of older adults [29,32]. The importance of this point is clearly visible when evaluating platforms and experiences which were created incrementally and their technical and procedure-driven complexity increased overtime, such as Wikipedia [24].…”

“…As the share of older adults, here understood as people aged 65+, especially in western societies, is increasing it more and more important to design remote and scalable ICT-based activities, such as crowdsourcing, that provide them with cognitive challenges, enable positive interaction and active ageing [1,4,12,20,32]. Crowdsourcing projects, on the other hand can benefit from the massive, and largely untapped, potential of older adults' collective intelligence, experience and time [13,20,32]. Especially that they have proven to be dedicated, diligent and successful contributors [14,20,29,30,32] who are held back not only by inaccessible task-driven project design, which is incompatible with their prevailing motivations [11] and possible age-related cognitive decline in the processing speed and working memory [21] and the idea of worker expendability [3,4,19,23] but also a lack of support mechanisms [4,32], which all result in preventable dropouts, as shown in Fig 2.…”