Orig. title: Les sites Web d’information destinés aux enfants et aux jeunes sont-ils vraiment “ child-friendly ” ?
Engl. transl.: Are websites intended for children and teens truly childfriendly?
Publication details
| Year: | 2014 |
| Issued: | 2014 |
| Language: | French |
| Start Page: | 21 |
| End Page: | 34 |
| Editors: | |
| Authors: | Tilleul C.; Fastrez P.; De Smedt T. |
| Type: | Conference proceeding |
| Publisher: | Centre d’études sur les Jeunes et les Médias : Paris2014 |
| Place: | Lyon |
| Topics: | Literacy and skills; Internet usage, practices and engagement |
| Sample: | 16 young people between 9 and 18 years old ivided in three age groups: 9-11 years old, 12-14 years old and 15-18 years old. Ten of them live with their two parents, have the Belgian nationality, three live in a reception center, separated from their parents, and three live with their parents but immigrated to Belgium. The constitution of this sample, of limited size, was not intended the statistical representativeness of the population concerned by the research. It was rather to observe a diversity of juvenile information practices, and in particular of difficulties encountered by users. Age and family environment only come into play here as factors likely to vary these practices. |
| Implications For Stakeholders About: | Industry; Researchers |
Abstract
In this article, we are interested in the way youngsters navigate on the internet and appropriate content on these public websites of information that are especially intended for them. Based on a state of the research and a navigation test with young people aged 9 to 18, we will try to define the most important factors likely to make a site adequately readable by these young people (childfriendly).
Outcome
The main goal of this study is to provide recommendations effective for designers of web pages for children and young people. Especially because these suggestions may appear diametrically opposed to many current practices. "There are two hypotheses formulated for that: (1) designers are mostly preoccupied with the attention management of the user to a page or an isolated area of the page, while on the contrary, this study tries to make the user perform complex cognitive processes of extraction and construction assets and (2) two models of media and associated uses would thus be implicitly opposed; one that tries to draw the user's attention to simple information, another that is limited to having information encoded in a readable and ergonomically organized language and space in order to promote autonomous navigation and reading by users.
These observations made with young users of the sites contradict the current practices in the world of professional site design for young people and thus invites information and communication researchers to multiply experimental approaches in order for a better understanding on how to make websites more accesible to children and teens." (Tilleul et al., 2014, pp. 30-31, translated by Joanna Beeckmans)