Large print and hearing aids for the baby boomers

The New York Times ran an arti­cle today about adap­tive aids for the baby boomers. Because I was born before 1964, tech­ni­cally I am a boomer, even though I don’t feel like one.

The Lucida font is one exam­ple cited by Times jour­nal­ist Katie Hafner. The font was co-designed for Apple by Charles Bigelow to pro­vide a highly read­able font for low res­o­lu­tion print­ers and mon­i­tors. Lucida is the default menu font for Mac OS X and the Safari web browser, and has been included in Microsoft Win­dows since 1995. Wikipedia has a page full of examples.

Tiny fonts in web browsers? There’s hope.

Hafner men­tions that Inter­net Explorer and the Mac have fea­tures to enlarge fonts on the screen. These are handy, espe­cially when using a lap­top com­puter. I’ve noticed that Inter­net Explorer some­times com­presses or man­gles the page lay­out when dis­play­ing enlarged or zoomed fonts. In my favorite web browser, Fire­fox, fonts can be enlarged with the Ctrl+ key­stroke on a Win­dows com­puter, or Com­mand+ on a Mac. this method doesn’t always work, espe­cially on sites that use Flash.

There are a few screen mag­ni­fy­ing util­i­ties for Win­dows users. I’ve used Mag­nifixer, a free­ware prod­uct that is easy to install. Win­dows also has its own acces­si­bil­ity util­i­ties, avail­able in the Start, Acces­sories folder.

Mac users can find a Zoom fea­ture in the Uni­ver­sal Access pref­er­ences panel. There is a built-in fea­ture to enlarge the mouse cur­sor, but the results look awful. I use Pin­point, a US$10 app, to dis­play a very large mouse cur­sor on my Mac­Book Pro.

It’s much harder to enlarge the fonts on a mobile phone or PDA. A few mod­els pro­vide adap­tive fea­tures, but most don’t. The Side­kick 3 pro­vides no way to enlarge a font on the screen, and that’s been a sore point for a few of my col­leagues. Larger screens can help, like the dis­play of an iPhone. But a larger screen almost always increases the device’s size and reduces bat­tery life.

Oticon’s Delta hear­ing aid was pro­filed in the New York Times on Sep­tem­ber 24. This model looks more like a fash­ion acces­sory, and is mar­keted towards users in the 40–60 age group.

Hear­ing aids that look like Blue­tooth headsets

A blog that cov­ers tech­nol­ogy for older users, 50+Digital, posted an arti­cle last week about the Audeo. This hear­ing aid is mar­keted as a “per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tions assis­tant”. It looks like a large Blue­tooth head­set, but it is sim­i­lar in many ways to the Delta.

Devices like the Audeo and Delta will become more pop­u­lar, accord­ing to Don Aucoin of the Boston Globe, as boomers hunt for fash­ion­able alter­na­tives to tra­di­tional hear­ing aids and read­ing glasses.

I expect more younger users to adopt hear­ing aids, partly because they’ve blown out their hear­ing with their iPods. I’m always care­ful to keep my iPod’s vol­ume at a level that will let me hear traf­fic noise.

Tagged as: ADA, Apple, browser, Firefox, hardware, Internet, iPhone, iPod, Microsoft, mobile, pda, software, student, USA, usability