Age-Friendly Homepages

Vollständiger Abstract

Worum geht es in dieser Arbeit?

Becoming an AARP-designated “age-friendly'' state is a five-year project, and states who choose to do so, often create a website devoted to policy efforts and initiative updates. On these websites, visual rhetoric and writing play a central role in communicating with the public. These websites have implications for how aging is represented and who is included in this online space, both in photographs and in a website’s alternative text (alt text). To conduct my analysis, I selected three “age-friendly” state homepages and used a framework of text and image integration (Shriver, 1997) and accessibility (Horton & Quesenbery, 2013). My analysis revealed that “age-friendly” state pages must provide greater representation of what aging can look like and should include informative and useful alternative text. I also analyzed the Age-Friendly Minnesota site for the network of digital tools (Spinuzzi, 2015). Through this analysis, I found evidence of an ethos of transparency being developed through a large amount of content being made available online, including meeting videos, which captured both efforts to be accountable to the public and moments of adapting to technology. In giving users access to the unedited meetings, they gain access to the mundane and necessary coordination of technology as well as a greater understanding of the process for developing policy.