NAVEGO: Design and Formative Evaluation of an Accessible Web Extension to Support Safe Browsing for Older Adults
Resumo
Older adults are increasingly exposed to digital services for communication, access to information, online payments, and social participation. However, this growing dependence on web technologies may also increase their vulnerability to intrusive advertising, misleading interfaces, fraudulent forms, phishing attempts, and social engineering attacks. This paper presents NAVEGO, a web extension designed to support safer browsing experiences for older adults by combining ad and pop-up blocking, detection of potentially malicious forms, accessible interface resources, and preventive guidance. The development process was grounded in Human-Computer Interaction principles. It included benchmarking of existing ad-blocking tools, persona-based design, low- and mediumfidelity prototyping, analytical usability inspection, heuristic evaluation, automated accessibility assessment, and a formative accessibility evaluation conducted by three of the authors acting as expert evaluators in persona-based scenarios. No older adults took part in the evaluations reported here; the findings therefore characterize barriers anticipated by evaluators, and not the effectiveness of the extension for its target population. The evaluations revealed usability and accessibility issues, including limited visibility of controls, ambiguous terminology, screen reader announcements based on internal variable names, insufficient feedback for critical actions, and unclear communication of protection states. These findings yield concrete design recommendations for accessible and usable security tools aimed at older adults, and define the corrections required before an evaluation with older participants can be undertaken.
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