Chromebooks are awesome in many ways for the elderly, but the fact that you can't disable password entry at startup has been a dealbreaker for my aging father. He can't type easily and is beginning to struggle with passwords.
Paradoxically, this means that he's still running his Ubuntu laptop (he has been using UNIX systems since a DEC Alpha) but getting left behind on a lot of accessibility features and has minimal support from nursing-home staff.
Struggling with passwords has also meant that he is endlessly resetting passwords or creating new accounts, compounding confusion.
It is a tricky set of problems, with no easy answers.
Or, perhaps a physical password manager that can store multiple passwords, with a labeled button for each?
But I agree with the overall tone of what you're saying and I have the same kind of problem with my parents. I think the movement away from common protocols just made it worse, before you could have a simplified client just for the elderly or any other "niche" group and it would work, now if you do something like this for Whatsapp or Instagram you would probably receive a cease and desist letter.
I’ve noticed in the last decade that my fingers too have less oil and I sometimes have to wet my finger.
That was until my mom phoned me telling me her keyboard was broken. Took me a while to diagnose that she was trying to enter letters into the pin-field and it gave no indication that you weren't supposed to do that, it just didn't input any characters.
Also turns out the Windows account metaphor has gotten really confusing since they introduced microsoft accounts that are both local and online but don't necessarily share the same characteristics and now you have like 3 different passwords for the single "account" concept.
I completely agree, but at the same time it's funny that you can take a two-year-old without any formal technology training at all, accidentally leave an iPad where they can get it, and before long they're showing you gesture commands you didn't even know about.
A small child has zero degree of caution. An older person knows they don't know and worries that ignorance will somehow break the device (permanently or temporarily).
A small child usually doesn't have a formal expectation of what they are trying to achieve, it's largely experimentation, maybe with the intent to discover fun or find games, but it's pretty basic. An older person often will have a very specific y'all they would like to accomplish while being aware they aren't totally sure the device can do it, and if it can, how exactly to get the device to do it.
I think these two inputs create a feedback loop that works to promote technology acquisition in children and retard it among older people.
As a parent of small children I regularly have to repair electronic devices that have been temporarily broken (e.g. different languages set, screens locked out, tablet storage filled by thousands of burst photos of the floor) and a small but growing collection of electronic devices that have been permanently broken (e.g. antennas pulled off of radios, keys pulled off keyboards, ports yanked out) by this lack of caution.
> An older person knows they don't know and worries that ignorance will somehow break the device (permanently or temporarily).
This may be rational learned behavior. If they don't have someone on hand to fix issues then with many interfaces it's surprisingly easy to get yourself stuck in a situation where it's not obvious how to get out.
By contrast, someone older but less experienced to technology comes to the iPad with a specific goal in mind. Unlike toddlers, whose whole mission in life is to form an image of what to them is a uniformly mysterious world, these are smart people who don't want to have to learn a whole new paradigm to do one thing. Not only can they not do the thing they want; worse, the motion and lights that accompany their attempts are not delighting to them as to the two-year-old, but somewhere between distracting and unpleasant.
I've observed this as well. The hardest part are the basic concepts. Examples:
- The idea of a "settings menu" itself is somewhat of an alien concept and mostly limited to devices with screens.
- Not all UI elements have obvious meanings if you aren't already used to them.
- The input device itself might be unfamiliar (mouse, keyboard, touchscreen) and the user's brain might be busy trying to understand how to interact with the device at all, let alone do useful things with it.
- Some users never learned the "why" or even the "what" of existing devices, only the "how" -- they don't understand concepts like "applications", they just follow very specific steps that someone laid out for accomplishing specific tasks. This makes it very difficult to discover functionality or adapt to a different UI, because they don't know what anything actually is in the first place.
A lot of companies and people don't realy appreciate how much training is really needed to operate even the simplest of mobile phones.
I've not really seen any solutions other than making buttons bigger and reducing menu options, I'm sure these are great for those with deteriorating eyesight, but they aren't really offering anything for a person who has never used a smartphone before.
The real solution has to be usable by someone who has never operated _any_ modern technology - It has to be so simple you could maybe even train a dog to use.
An idea of mine is to have a bank of "walkie talkies" - one for each person you wish to speak to.
And this problem is always growing; my parents haven't retired yet, but even they are struggling to use today's on-demand television. What will happen when digital terrestrial TV is shut down and they have to learn to use whatever new interface is on the successor to the inevitably cancelled Android TV.