Digital Fika - Designing Accessible Digital User Experiences for Older Adults

Abstract

This thesis explores accessibility and digital commensality through creating a set of recommendations and developing a website prototype called Digital Fika. Through an iterative process the prototype was developed and tested with a user group consisting of older adults around the ages of 70 and 80 years. The users were a bit skeptical towards Digital Fika at first, but when the concept had a more refined and responsive prototype interface they were more interested and positive towards it. Throughout the process, a set of recommendations for how to build an accessible web page were also created. It became clear during the process that the testers were not diverse enough to create and test a broad set of accessibility recommendations, rather they fit able bodied older adults with some experience of technology and a variation of visual impairments. To further the research in this thesis, one should test the concept and accessibility guidelines with a test group with a more varied set of impairments to give a more accurate account of which accessibility recommendations are important, and more varied in cultural background to see how that affects socialization. In addition to this, one could look at the accessibility of the technology users use to interact with the website.