Literature Reviews
Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.
139 results found tagged older adults.
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The Intersecting Liminality of Technology Adoption and Disability during Life Transitions
This paper introduces the concept of "intersecting liminality" to explain how people with disabilities navigate technology adoption during major life transitions. The research combines two complementary studies: semi-structured interviews with 22 bli…
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Voice-Powered Assembly: Boosting Self-Efficacy in Older Adults with "Build2Race"
This study investigates whether voice assistants (VAs) can support older adults in physical product assembly—a largely unexplored use case despite the proliferation of self-assembly products and the importance of such tasks for independent living. Th…
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"I knew that, I was just testing you": Understanding Older Adults' Impression Management Tactics During Usability Studies
This paper investigates how older adults (65+) engage in impression management (IM) during usability studies—conscious or unconscious behaviors to present themselves favorably to researchers. While IM is known to affect research validity, its specifi…
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A Unifying Notification System To Scale Up Assistive Services
This paper addresses a fundamental scalability problem in assistive technology for older adults: the "silo-based" approach where each assistive service (pill reminders, door monitors, activity trackers) implements its own notification system. When ol…
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Balance Assessment in Fall-Prevention Exergames
This paper presents two exergames designed to motivate elderly adults to perform fall-prevention exercises while simultaneously collecting balance assessment data using the Nintendo Wii Balance Board (WBB). Falls are a major health concern for older …
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Who Should Have Access to my Pointing Data? Privacy Tradeoffs of Adaptive Assistive Technologies
This UMBC study examines the often-overlooked privacy tradeoffs inherent in Adaptive Assistive Technologies (AATs) — software systems that monitor user performance data to automatically adapt their functionality. While AATs offer significant usabilit…
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Why Is Gesture Typing Promising for Older Adults? Comparing Gesture and Tap Typing Behavior of Older with Young Adults
This study from Stony Brook University investigates whether gesture typing (gliding a finger continuously across keys to spell words) is a viable alternative to traditional tap typing for older adults on smartphones. Text entry is one of the most sig…
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Help Kiosk: An Augmented Display System to Assist Older Adults to Learn How to Use Smart Phones
This demonstration paper presents Help Kiosk (HK), a system that uses a large 19-inch touchscreen display to temporarily augment a smartphone's small screen during learning episodes for older adults. The system addresses two converging trends: rapidl…
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Evaluation of techniques defined in WCAG 2.0 with older people
This paper evaluates two specific WCAG 2.0 techniques — keyboard-based navigation (Guideline 2.1) and design of link purpose (Guideline 2.4) — with older people aged 65 to 80 in two real-world design projects for old-age pensioner associations in Bar…
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Web 2.0: Hype or Happiness?
This keynote paper by Mary Zajicek of Oxford Brookes University takes a deliberately broad, holistic view of Web 2.0 accessibility, arguing that physical access to web content is only the starting point. Zajicek defines accessibility along three dime…