Navigating the complex web of a smartphone interface can be challenging for senior citizens. But with these simple tweaks, even the most advanced smartphones can be operated with ease by the elderly.
Navigating your way around a smartphone might be second nature to you, but that’s not the case with senior citizens. Old age comes with its own set of problems, from decreased mobility to visual impairment. This, coupled with the fact that seniors find the very interface of smartphones confusing only makes it more difficult for them to operate the device. Fortunately, there is a way around this. By making some minor tweaks to the settings, you can make the user experience as intuitive as it was intended to be. Here’s how you can make the smartphone experience more accessible for elders.
Improve readability: If you have an elderly person in your family, the most common complaint you will hear from them when using a smartphone is that they face difficulty in reading. While boosting the size of the text does improve readability, make sure you also increase the contrast so that the colours are rendered more distinctly.
Simplify the user interface: Instead of tweaking individual settings, use a launcher to reskin the phone interface. This includes home screens, settings menus, app drawer and more. Some launchers are designed to make the browsing experience smoother for seniors by streamlining the options and menus, making the text large and aesthetically pleasing, and the colours brighter for easy readability.
Enable advanced alerts: Seniors often tend to miss calls and messages, sometimes even when the vibration mode is on. Raising the ringtone volume is an option. If that fails to solve the problem, then LED flash alerts can do the trick. The phone will send out flashes every time they get a call or a message. If they have the habit of checking their phones constantly, then they would notice the flash and know when to expect calls and messages.
Disable auto-correct and simplify keyboard settings: One of the most common hurdles that seniors face while using smartphones is navigating their way around the virtual keyboard. Since it is not tactile, it can get quite difficult for them to type out things using their device. To avoid confusion, just disable gesture-based typing and auto-correct on their device.
Activate voice control: This one is a no-brainer. Even if you make the interface smoother with the help of magnifiers and large buttons, it can get difficult to tap away at the touchscreen with age, especially with the loss of manual dexterity. This is precisely the reason every smartphone comes with voice-activated digital assistants. Seniors can just speak out their requests instead of having to rely on their fingers to type out messages or check for weather forecasts.
Activate text-to-speech: If they have trouble reading even after you have adjusted the contrast and font size, then you can activate text to speech on the device so that the voice assistant reads text out loud. This is especially helpful for elders with poor vision. Not only does it free them from having to read text, it also protects their eyes from further strain. If elders in your family have a habit of reading the newspaper every morning, then you can install the news app on their phones and activate the text-to-speech feature.
Make off-screen reading easier: Once you have made the smartphone easier to navigate, you can further use the device to improve accessibility in the real world as well. For example, you can teach them how to use the flashlight to illuminate dark spaces and text in dimly-lit environments. Better still, you can install a text magnifying app, which will make it easier to read fine print, menus, books and other documents.
Install AppLock: You also need to make sure that your relative does not change the settings inadvertently. To keep this from happening, install AppLock on the phone. It does exactly what the title suggests. It blocks access to certain applications. Once you install it, take administrator access and lock the access to WiFi, auto sync, Bluetooth as well as other applications with complicated options, so that you do not have to keep coming back and fixing problems created by accident.
Store emergency information: All the smartphones in the market have locks that need a code or a fingerprint to gain access to the phone. However, they also have an emergency mode which is accessible by anyone. Store pertinent personal and medical information using this mode. If a senior falls down while running an errand or is unresponsive, then a concerned citizen or medical professional will be able to fetch their personal details, learn about any medical condition they might be suffering from, and know the appropriate course of action to take.
Don’t be condescending: While showing them the ropes, make sure you resist the temptation to over-explain things. If you keep explaining things after they have understood them, it will only undo all their learning. Also, give them time to get a grasp of the basics. Once they are comfortable, you can get into advanced areas like using the app store in case they are interested.
Install Teamviewer: If you don’t stay with your grandparents, and they keep running into problems with their smartphones, then install Teamviewer, an app that grants you remote access to their device. If they ever run into trouble again, ask them to open the app and give you the access code so you can take control of their device and fix the problem.
The author is director and creative strategist, CHAI Kreative