Numerous sets of web design guidelines for making websites more accessible for older people have been suggested, but there is little empirical evidence from studies with older people upon which to base their recommendations. In addition, the different web design guidelines often provide different recommendations. Finally, most of the web design guidelines are in English and relate to the use of the Latin alphabet. Currently, there are no web design guidelines for the Thai language or for Thai older people.
The objective of this research is to investigate the recommendations from web design guidelines for Thai and UK older people, especially the recommendations related to the presentation of text for reading web pages. These are the variables investigated: line spacing, text justification, font type, font size, text colour and background colour. The recommendations were investigated with a series of empirical studies that asked both younger and older people to read web pages presented in different ways.
The first study investigated the effect of line spacing and text justification. The results of this experiment found that 1.5 or double line spacing were preferred by both younger and older people in the UK and Thailand. For the UK web readers, both left justification and left - right justification were preferred. For Thai web readers, left - right justification was preferred. As interesting issues about the task emerged in the first experiment, the second study explored the range and appropriateness of a variety of tasks for research about reading web pages. The results of the experiment indicated the use of skimming reading as an appropriate task in the further experiments.
The third study investigated the effect of font type and size on skim reading web pages. The experiment found that UK web users preferred Arial font type in comparison to Times New Roman, however Thai web users preferred a Thai conservative font type, which is closely related to serif. On font size, 14 point or larger was preferred by both the UK and Thai younger adults. For both the UK and Thai older adults, 16 point was preferred. The fourth study investigated the effect of text and background colour on skim reading web pages. Black text on white background and sepia text on off-white were preferred by all participants.
Based on results of the experiment in this programme of research, an evidence-based set of web design guidelines for the presentation of text for older people in both Thailand and the UK was developed.
