Preparing a Mac laptop for your Grandma

An iPad makes much more sense for the very young and very old with their accessibility requirements.<p>The iPad is lucky in that it could start afresh with many ideas.<p>- They keyboard represents letters of the alphabet, and it only appears when it's needed, compared to my laptop keyboard which has about 30 obscure buttons that have almost no use to most casual users.<p>- You interact with only the content directly through touch, rather than through a mouse or touch pad that is on a perpendicular plane to the display.<p>- Making text bigger is as easy as pinch to zoom.<p>- There's much less that can go wrong as each app is sandboxed and access is limited. People can be more confident in their actions.<p>My 2 year old niece can quite easily play youtube videos yet I've seen my 90 year old Grandad struggle with a mouse, using his second hand to click the button. For either of them, there's little that they'd want to do on a laptop that couldn't do much more simply on a tablet.

If your grandmother only uses Safari... why not buy her a Chromebook instead?<p>More and more general consumers are using their computers as internet terminals. A Mac or any fully-fledged desktop machine is overkill for that, and the Chrome OS interface is very, VERY usable for a grandmother. My grandma picked it up with little difficulty, and learned how to use an iPad without any assistance either. She's now downloading applications, buying music, and emailing plus surfing the Net on it.<p>A 13" MacBook Air just doesn't seem like the right option, especially considering it's $1199 when a Chromebook is less than a quarter of that ($249).

Having done this before, if all that will really be used is a web browser:<p><pre><code> Sell the current laptop Buy a chromebook Use extra $$$ to pay for wireless service IFF you really need remote admin, add chromebook to google apps. </code></pre> Everything will work and update reliably for a long time. You can't mess anything up. It's great.

<i>"The only app my grandma uses is Safari, really. Sometimes on the phone it's helpful to have her go to System Preferences."</i><p>Sounds like a Chromebook use case or a 'kiosk' mode Linux distro.<p>I have an ibook G4 running 10.04 fine and sympathise with the initial problem!

&#62; <i>The pace of obsolecence on the Internet is unacceptable.</i><p>Or it's unacceptable that I can't buy hay to feed my horses every mile down 5th Ave in Manhattan. Sorry -- you're entitled to your opinion, of course, but it's a pretty silly thing to say. The world changes. Things progress.

Having set up multiple pcs for friends and family I often got calls from especially my parents with "it says I should update something, I didn't know what to do so I closed the window, what should I do now?".<p>I found the solution (for windows machines) a tool called Ninite (<a href="http://ninite.com" rel="nofollow">http://ninite.com</a>). It makes an installer with a lot of commonly used apps such as flash, chrome, java, Skype, TEAMVIEWER (for additional iFamilyTechSupport cases) etc. Every time you run this installer it automatically updates all of the applications with the newest version. Another bonus is that you don't have to click "next" or "install" and you don't have to worry about toolbars (no more Ask toolbars when updating java!!).<p>They do have some "upgrade" options where the installer runs silently in the background in my case it was enough to make a simple task that is set to run once a month and the instructions I gave haven't caused confusion yet: "Once a month this small thing appears, just let it do its thing and click Close when it is done"<p>Just make sure you enter these applications and disable the update notification settings so you avoid the phone calls you can't do anything about.

I'd consider setting up crashplan or some other automatic cloud backup pretty important, unless the grandma only uses it as a web browser (in which case I'd go ChromeOS)

<i>"Make fonts bigger in Safari. I set her up with Safari just because it's bundled with the OS and is the most straightforward, although surely Firefox and Chrome have similar options."</i><p>Being not so young anymore, I also like to set my browsers (Chrome and Firefox) to use bigger default fonts. But I find it amazing how many web sites out there have their layouts completely screwed up unless you use the default font size. When this happens, I have to hit ctrl-minus a few times for the site to look readable again. I've seen this kind of breakage on the web sites of major newspapers and other big businesses.

I'd add turning on screen sharing and setting up a dynamic DNS client so it's easy to get on and help.

Another thing could be to lock the dock - my grandmother occasionally accidentally drags icons off the dock, resulting in her calling me because the Internet has disappeared.

<p><pre><code> Don't forget to buy her a good and "ergonomic chair" too. </code></pre> A) Install one of the "many" ChromeOS alternatives, see: <a href="http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2009/12/30/10-free-fast-booting-linux-distros-that-arent-chrome-os/" rel="nofollow">http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2009/12/30/10-free-fast-bo...</a><p>B) Get a Tablet. iPad or Android, it really really doesn't matter!<p>UI changes are negligible when the UX is much more intuitive, accessible and better. Most Tablets are filled with crapware and have ugly default settings like tiny font-size, too many app-icons. It is entirely clear that touchscreens are more intuitive, when the UI and UX is optimized to do as much as possible for you with only minimal and intuitive input.<p>If your grandma is "smarter" and needs the "Computer" to work with Office, then you better get her a Notebook. Again Brand doesn't matter. Make sure the screen is large enough and that buttons have background illumination. If your Grandma is weak, buy her a PC not a Notebook, so she doesn't has to grab that heavy thing up and down.

Tip: With respect to web accessibility, Mark Pilgrim's "Dive into Accessibility" [1] is still a great primer, even more than a decade after he wrote it. While the underlying technologies have changed quite a bit, it remains a good introduction to the basic principles and why they matter.<p>[1] <a href="http://diveintoaccessibility.info/" rel="nofollow">http://diveintoaccessibility.info/</a>

Something I've noticed is a sticking point with some less experienced computer users is file system navigation, specifically being able to consistently locate files (e.g. for web uploads).<p>It's something I've considered attempting to solve myself, but no super intuitive and clean solutions come to mind. Has anyone else run into this issue, either with friends or family?

When I set up a computer for my grandpa to read email from the family (white list heavy) and browse some newspapers from his home country (bookmarked only the ones that worked without javascript) i used linux with windowmaker. pretty much the same as a mac Dock. huge buttons always visible on the screen.<p>the shock came when you give him a mouse and say to click at that big link and he just raise the mouse to the screen and looks at you like "what now?". maybe i should have started with the Wii, if it wasn't some 15yrs too early.<p>I tried very hard to predict every point where they would need 'specialized knowledge' about computers and preemptively worked around it somehow. but after a while, it proved better to gave em hell (i.e. not try to shield them) and just be easy to reach for questions (and re-image)

While Apple, Microsoft and Google and anyone else who makes stuff for the internet aren't necessarily to blame for this, they could go a long way in making it easier for older people to use Computer's for this. The demographic for 70/80/90+ people using PCs must be relatively small compared to the rest of the market and is surely decreasing all the time with the onset of tablets.<p>Maybe it would be helpful if Apple/Microsoft/Google could increase the Accessibility options and maybe add some sort of option to disable all the stuff and more that Talos mentions and automatically have the Computer set up an "Accessibility account" for those in such a situation.<p>Great post, really made me think about our attitude to accessibility on the web and how robust we have to be in building Apps and websites.

I'm not sure how hard it would be, but I wonder if you could turn these suggestions into a script. I'm sure a lot of people would pay $10 (just throwing out a price point) for an app that allows you to quickly setup a computer for an extremely non-technical user.

Well, if it comes to Flash updates, you might prefer Chrome which seamlessly upgrades itself and the used Flash package in the background. On the downside, slight UI changes might happen with new Chrome versions.<p>Also Linux is still an option. It could be configured for all the needs (contrast, font size, clean UI, autologin, ...) and has some additional administrative features like automatically upgrades in the background (including Flash, if Ubuntu is still providing that meta package) and every configuration could is also openly reflected in the file system which might help doing remote support and backups. Also it might prevent the usual Windows/Mac malware downloads.

&#62;turn off 2 finger scrolling<p>This is insane advice.

10.4 and PPC-based Macs can still be useful (I use my 12" PowerBook every day). Get MacTubes to watch YouTube, as a benefit you don't see most of the ads.<p>TenFourFox as you noted, or OmniWeb for the browser. Install a script blocker (NoScript for TenFourFox, or use site-specific Preferences in OmniWeb). Use a hosts file to blocking most ad sites. This makes most websites a lot faster.<p>Maybe this is not practical for "grandma" but it lets me keep using my otherwise bulletproof (knock on wood) PowerBook.

With respect to requiring Flash on YouTube, have you checked out YouTube5[1]? I've found that I can use most of the web without Flash using this extension (of course, it depends which websites your grandma uses...)<p>[1] <a href="http://www.verticalforest.com/youtube5-extension/" rel="nofollow">http://www.verticalforest.com/youtube5-extension/</a>

I think it's very sad that, considering how far we've come, computers -- I include phones, etc. -- still support older users very poorly out-of-the-box.<p>In particular, it is <i>ridiculous</i> that this is still a good idea (especially considering it's an Apple machine):<p>&#62; Make everything bigger. ... I cut her resolution from 1440 by 900 to 1024 by 640.

Just found this solution for YouTube: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vlc-for-youtube/ablmclcliiiegfmpbkfhnhipoejclmel?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vlc-for-youtube/ab...</a><p>About to try it out, so can't say how good it is yet.

&#62; The fad for hiding controls when you're not using them &#62; (looking at you, scroll bars)<p>Set System Preferences &#62; General &#62; Show Scroll Bars &#62; Always!

I like to enable SSH on my parent's laptop, so if they phone up and ask for help with something, usually I can SSH in and fix it remotely.

This reads like an ad form ChromeBooks. ;-) Seriously, though, was that (or an iPad) an option?