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We’re all going to need accessibility affordances one day

UX probably needs to think more about aging.

Daley Wilhelm
UX Collective
7 min readFeb 9, 2025

An illustration of a confused senior reading a book with a magnifying glass, a woman with a cane wandering in the city, and a hard of hearing old man.
We’re all getting older. Image by Daley Wilhelm.

We’re all getting older, quite literally. Aging populations have become a significant trend in countries like the US and Japan where birth rates are falling and people are living longer than ever before. It’s great to have longevity — but ensuring the quality of that long life should be a chief concern of both politicians and user experience designers.

Ashley Shew writes in her (in my humble opinion) required reading book, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement,

“We can never have too many reminders that anyone who lives long enough can expect disability eventually; disability is a very normal and predictable part of the human experience.”

If we’re lucky enough to become octogenarians, we will all need accessibility affordances. Shew, and many others, tell us that the future will see more disabilities, but that approaches to assistive technology as they are now might not be the “solution.” Indeed, thinking as disability as a problem to “solve” is tantamount to technoableism.

Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs…

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Daley Wilhelm

A fiction writer turned UX writer dedicated to crisp copy, inclusive experiences, and humanizing tech.

Responses (4)

Forget age: nobody can stretch their thumb more than halfway up a screen! Why are their UI elements up there out of reach?

4

Well said! 🙌

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The first time I truly feel I had to address senior accessibility was ~5 years ago working on a golf resort's website rebuild. It was a complete overhaul of a massive amount of content, organization and functionality. A key demographic was 55+…

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