Designing Instructional Text for Older Readers: A Literature Review

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of whether or not we need to design text differently for older readers. Research with relatively simple text indicates that there is little firm evidence to suggest that making design changes for older readers (except for increasing type-sizes) facilitates their performance. However, research with more complex text settings suggests that changes made to facilitate the understanding of complex text appear to hinder older readers. These findings suggest that older readers should be asked to play a part in the user-testing stage of the development of instructional text.