All,

With the tremendous advances introduced by Plasma and friends in KDE4, I was wondering if there has been any research or work done to explore custom usability features for the elderly. I know KDE4 has a rather vast range of help for people with poor eyesight and such, but what I was looking for is something that also makes the computer desktop easy to use for beginning computer users at age 65+.

The reason why I ask is because my mother, who just turned 70, now wants a laptop so she can start communicating with her grandchildren online. She's willing to be some sort of "guineapig" for a test project, but we need to stress that probably fits the "computer illiterate" description quite closely.

Is there any interest for putting together a plasma theme or similar with large buttons, a few easy-to-use applications, and a select few accessibility functions such as large icons easy to press and perhaps an extra large font size etc.

Has anything similar been done or considered? Is it of interest to any other than my parents?

-y1

You can adjust the font size from KMenu -> System Settings -> Appearance -> Fonts. Changing the font size should also change the button size -- Try setting "General" font size to 14.

You can also use the "Zoom" utility from System Settings -> Desktop -> All effects -> Zoom
Zoom in using Super (Meta/Win key) + "=" and zoom out using Super + "-" (or set custom keys). For using Zoom effects, you must have "Desktop effects" enabled (Under the General tab)

LinuxIsInnovation wrote:
You can adjust the font size from KMenu -> System Settings -> Appearance -> Fonts. Changing the font size should also change the button size -- Try setting "General" font size to 14.

Thanks for answering. I know I can tweak these things individually - maybe I worded myself unclear in the original post.
My question was more if there's interest in creating a KDE4 theme for the elderly, where these things are set correct for elderly users to begin with. With taking away the menu and just having 3-4 big buttons for web, mail and word processing for instance, large fonts, zooming and whatever else makes it easy.
My guess is the uptake among the elderly would be much higher if there's already a ready "package" rather than having to tweak all this by oneself, no?
So the question if there are any usability studies planned for such a narrow demographic stands - just to figure out what their needs are and how plasma and friends can be used to address it further, rather than going one tweak at the time...

-y1

Yalla-One wrote:My question was more if there's interest in creating a KDE4 theme for the elderly, where these things are set correct for elderly users to begin with. With taking away the menu and just having 3-4 big buttons for web, mail and word processing for instance, large fonts, zooming and whatever else makes it easy.

I'm not sure if this would be a good idea. Or rather: the idea to apply a lot of settings in one go would be a good idea, but not calling it a "UI for the elderly" or something along those lines. And especially not if the default settings for such a UI would be dumbed down (i.e., menu removed and just some common apps on the desktop). They're older, not stupid, and I'm willing to bet that quite a few elderly people would be insulted if they felt the computer treated them as if they were more stupid or computer illiterate than any other given demographic group.

Besides, some of the problems older people have are not unheard of in other age groups as well. For grandmother's eyesight (she's 88) is probably equal to mine (admittedly my eye-sight is very bad). Some elderly can't use their hands as well as when they were younger, but things like that can affect young(er) people as well.

Kryten2X4B wrote:
Besides, some of the problems older people have are not unheard of in other age groups as well. For grandmother's eyesight (she's 88) is probably equal to mine (admittedly my eye-sight is very bad). Some elderly can't use their hands as well as when they were younger, but things like that can affect young(er) people as well.

All valid points indeed - just what I hoped to get out of the discussion

I'm all with you on both the dumb down and not all problems are equal. However - just from listening to my own parents and my wife's parents (and before anyone object I agree it's a VERY SMALL sample pool), what they want is something really easy to use. They want to surf the web, read and send emails, and be able to write the occasional letter on an office-like application. That's pretty much it. On top of that, my father wants his dosemu to run his 1985 programs, but that's probably not so representative either

Hence I just thought- would it be a place to start to maybe use the Eee "dumbed down" menu-interface as starting point, and keeping most other stuff out of the way? Being KDE one can always just either exit "retired-mode" or turn on feature by feature. Thing is - my parents are not stupid - they're just not interested in eye-candy, user options or how things are done. As long as they can watch the grand-children, send and receive emails without worrying, and maybe write the occasional letter in kword/openoffice writer they're happy...

Anyway - given such a different outlook on this from only two people - you and me - wouldn't it perhaps be an idea to track the needs of elderly users a bit more closely to figure out what common interests exist? I have absolutely no experience in usability issues, except being a long-time user myself, but if there are some blueprints somewhere, why not start mapping?

Anyone from kde-usability reading this and have some insight to share?

Developers tend not to monitor the forums. It would be best if you want some insight from them to ask on their mailing list(s).

Yallo-One, I've been remastering Kubuntu/other Debian derivatives for the last couple of years with the "Silver Surfer" in mind and am also very excited about the possibilities afforded by KDE4.

However, I won't touch the new KDE until at least 4.2 is out and running - my beta keeps on complaining here and there and behaves, well, like a beta

I'd be very interested to hear what things you have done for your parents - perhaps send me a pm to compare notes?

Great news toad,

So far I've done little on KDE4 since I'm not planning to migrate them until KDE 4.2 either - I guess 4.2 is the big breakthrough event for most everyone...

What I've done on KDE3 so far is just trim down the menu to contain "Web Browser", "Mail" and "Writer", as well as choose large icons, set mouse sensitivity as to minimize the effects of hands "shaking" and increase font size.
I know a few people would call this "dumbing it down", but my folks would disagree. My father has been a software developer since the early 1970s, writing financial applications for CP/M and DOS, but jumped off the bandwagon at Windows95 as he didn't like it, and stayed with DOS. So while he's an "ex-poweruser" he now just wants something simple and not too much new, while at the same time keeping a windows of dosemu readily available for him to be able to use his old tools and live on his beloved DOS cli.
However, when GUIs are concerned, he want something simple, yet customizable, so that he can change it, but still not have hundreds of items to choose and get lost from in various menus. Hence the need for something simple to learn, still powerful to optionally customize.

Along those lines I've also installed a theme of large icons in firefox (not for eyesight, but to make them easy to point at), and am still searching for how to do the same on kmail without having to set a ridiculously large font size to through that force the buttons to increase in size...

Also found that they are not easily impressed by "bling" - when I showed them the 3D-stuff on my KDE 4.1.3 desktop the response was just "...uh.. and how exactly is this supposed to help us?"

However - a "silver surfer" theme for KDE4 with focus on a few such things would be an awesome starting point

Yep, same here. Change system fonts, added the no squint add on for firefox and some changes in its internals for font size, a large mouse theme and a customised menu depending on the user's needs pretty much sums it up. I've been bemoaning the lack of a good "looking glass" tool in KDE3 (and I'm no coder ), so I am just as excited by KDE4.2 as the rest of the world