Blog Usability For Older Readers

[EDITORIAL NOTE: Retirement Living Television is broadcasting a special report on medical marijuana which airs today at 1:30PM eastern time. Following that, there will be a live discussion during the Daily Cafe show (at about 3PM eastern time) with two experts debating the pros and cons of medical marijuana. You can see the shows on Direct TV, Comcast in the northeast or view it online at rl.tv.]

A blogger recently emailed Crabby Old Lady asking to be added to the Elderbloggers List. It’s a good blog, well-written, but Crabby declined to list it because it is so damned hard to navigate.

There is no entry on the home page, only a list on a sidebar by date and title. When Crabby clicks on the link, entries stretch across almost the entire screen, making it hard to read, and she cannot get to another post without clicking back to the home page, then to another story, back again, and so on.

In addition, a large image sits below the banner looking like the beginning of a blog entry but there is nothing else there when you scroll down. Crabby visited several times over weeks encountering the same image on each visit and assumed the blogger rarely updates. It took awhile to figure out that it’s decoration.

Blog layout and navigation has been settled on a standard now for several years with few variations. Readers expect to find those standards on all blogs, and usability research indicates that if readers can’t understand how to use a website in under five seconds, they leave.

Crabby Old Lady has put on her schoolmarm garb in the past and explained blog presentation, but it has been a couple of years and is worth repeating along with some special techniques to help older readers whose eyes are not so young and nimble as they once were.

Background Color
It is difficult and tiring for old eyes to try to read light text on a dark background. There is a reason 99 percent of text in all mediums is black on white – it works best. Crabby sometimes runs across pink and light green text on a white background; that’s difficult too. Go for strong contrast with a light background.

Color Combinations
As people age, they have difficulty distinguishing between red and orange, and between blue and green especially when they are near one another. If you use such a palette be sure, for example, not to use green to highlight links with dark blue normal text. Some shades of gray used near black are hard for elders to distinguish too.

CAPTCHA
That’s the acronym for those random letters we are forced to type with forms to help avoid spam. One style is black letters on a background of various grays making them close to impossible to read.

Crabby’s blog host, Typepad, uses that style and she has complained with no results. Crabby is astonished that anyone bothers to leave comments with such a barrier, and she hopes someone at Typepad is reading TGB today.

Crabby is not picking on them exclusively. Some Blogger forms have CAPTCHA letters so wiggly, Crabby has had to type them two and three times to get them right. There must be a better way.

So many blogs, so little time. Anything that helps us move quickly through our web rounds can't be anything but good. Some blog standards are helpful to elders, but are work well for everyone else too:

Paragraphs
Crabby Old Lady learned early in her web career, more than a decade ago, that it is painful to read long blocks of text on a screen without a break. Yes, she knows what we learned in school about a paragraph holding one idea. But when a paragraph goes for more than six or seven lines on screen, it pushes people away rather than drawing them in.

So Crabby taught herself to “chunk down” long ideas into two or three smaller ones which keeps paragraphs shorter. Be sure to use a blank line space between paragraphs too. And, by the way, this works in comments; it only takes on extra tap on the “enter” key.

Text Styling
Long blocks of italic text are as painful to read as light text on a dark background. It is better to save italic for short emphasis. Crabby knows she break this rule in editorial comments at the top and bottom of stories, but does her best to keep it to a minimum. Certainly entire posts should not be styled with italic.

Width of Text
When text stretches across the entire screen, it is impossible for almost anyone to read. The eye cannot find the next line down. This is not an issue with three-column blogs where columns are necessarily narrow, but the main section of some two-column blogs are too wide. It’s best to keep the story column to 500 pixels in width; 400 is even better.

Comments
Some bloggers and some blog software limit the length of comments, and someone once told Crabby that if a comment is longer than three paragraphs, it should be a post on your own blog. Crabby disagrees.

There is nothing wrong with continuing a conversation on your blog, but when the conversation is compelling, Crabby likes long comments that give readers a chance to fully explain their point of view and others to respond. And when leaving a comment, there’s nothing worse than being halfway through a thought only to have an arbitrary cutoff curtail your thinking.

There are other issues with the design of computer hardware, software and webpages that make using computers and the internet more difficult than it needs to be for elders. But they are not things users can fix. Crabby will be addressing some of them at the Gnomedex conference later this month.

[At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Ronni Prior tells of the folly of trying to be with it in Even a Miata Can't Make Me Cool.]