Designing Care Websites Older Families Can Read
Your audience is older than your designer
Senior living websites are read by two groups: adult children in their fifties and sixties, and prospective residents in their seventies and eighties. Both groups are further from perfect vision than the person designing the site. Type that looks elegant on a designer's monitor can be genuinely unreadable to the person deciding where to spend the next decade of their life.
The things that matter most
- Body text at 18px or larger, with generous line height. Sixteen is a floor, not a target.
- Contrast that clears WCAG AA, 4.5:1 for body text. Light grey on white fails, however good it looks.
- Links that look like links. Underlines are not old-fashioned, they are load-bearing.
- Tap targets of at least 44px, for hands that are less steady than they were.
- Real text instead of text baked into images, so it can be zoomed and read aloud.
Accessibility is also a legal exposure
In the US, website accessibility claims under ADA Title III are filed in volume, and senior living is a targeted vertical precisely because the audience is older adults. Courts routinely reference WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 AA as the practical standard. Building to it from the start costs a fraction of what a demand letter does.
Test it with the people who will use it
Automated checkers catch perhaps a third of real problems. The rest surface when somebody navigates your enquiry form with a keyboard, or when a family member tries to read your fees page on a phone in a hospital corridor. Watch someone do it. It is uncomfortable and it is the most useful hour you will spend.
If a family cannot read your fees page, the quality of your care never enters the conversation.
