Designing for the Life Span Segment 4
Designing for the Life Span Segment 4 
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[D]
Telephone access is an important consideration for older people- especially those suffering moderate to severe disabilities. Frequently in the older home, one telephone is located somewhere not necessarily within easy reach while engaged in activities of daily living. The oldest phones (pictured to the lower left) have clear graphics and a way to position the trembling finger- but they are hard on arthritics. They also offer more electronic security. The phone book presents other problems of legibility.
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No device in the home may be more important to an older adult living alone than the telephone. In this slide is pictured the oldest of the phones with a rotary dial - from which "dialing" became the word used to describe entering the coded information necessary to reach another party. This phone had the advantages of extreme durability, but the dial itself was a problem for arthritic fingers. The figure ground relationship is actually better than many contemporary phones that lack the size of figures and appropriate contrast to be legible. The phone book remains a problem in terms of legibility - as does the ever lengthening set of numbers and increasing number of area codes telephone service seems to require. Committing numbers to phone memory and listing them in writing is helpful.
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