Silver surfers

The US ibm.com home page has a feature on Helping seniors surf the web. The video sets the stage by talking about the aging Japanese population, and then explains how IBM helped Mitsukoshi, a department store, make its web site easier to use for older people.

The Human Ability and Accessibility Center has a case study if you want to know some of the details. (I thought there might be a Japanese version of the case study, but that page just links to the English version. No, I do not read Japanese, but one "trick" I have learned over the years is how to navigate in Japanese, and other languages, that I cannot read. One of the skills you acquire being on a worldwide team and working with great folks around the world, I guess.)

I think the last time usability and accessibility got this kind of coverage on the US home page was February 2007. Good to see. IBM does lots of cool things like this.

And in case anyone was wondering, I am part of the team that manages the high level links across the ibm.com sites. That includes the links in the tabs on the home pages (come to my talk in Detroit next week to hear stories about those links), but I have nothing to do with the feature stories. This time, however, the home page feature folks did give me a heads-up that this story was coming, since they knew I would be interested in it and might want to write about here. So I got a sneak preview of this one.