Edinburgh Napier University

  The older adult population in most developed countries is growing slowly, but continuously (Laslett, 1996). Several functional changes occur with age which may result in a decrease of perceptual, cognitive and motor skills (Smith et al., 2000). In spite of this well-known trend, designers continue to design instinctively for ?ablebodied? young people (Coleman, 1997). The result is products that are generally difficult to be used by elderly citizens and people with disabilities (Keates et al., 2000). Clearly new inclusive design approaches are required to interpret and evaluate the range of functional capabilities of this sector of the population and include them into mainstream design. The aim of this paper is to present a range of potential methods for assessing product accessibility. Although these methods provide valuable feedback about a product?s accessibility, many of them lack the ability to be liked with actual population data. An alternative assessment method, structured assessment, is proposed which enables designers to quantify with reasonable accuracy the numbers of users excluded from product usage.