Visitor Experience & Accessibility8 min read
Your 67-year-old visitor with a hearing aid walks into your historic house. She has a smartphone—most older adults do now—but the last app she downloaded was three years ago. A dense audio guide interface will frustrate her in the gift shop. A guide that speaks first and keeps screens simple will make her day.
Sites serving older visitors need audio guides built for people who didn't grow up touching screens. This isn't about talking down to older audiences. It's about designing for the actual constraints: trifocals and glare, hearing aids that need proper Bluetooth pairing, and a preference for voice-first interaction over menu navigation.
You can stop planning for the phone booth. About 73% of Americans over 65 own a smartphone, and that number keeps climbing. In the UK and Western Europe, it's similar or higher. Your elderly visitors are bringing phones to your site.
What's changed is what they expect those phones to do. Older visitors want audio guides that work like radio—push a button, listen to something curated. They don't want to tap through five screens to hear about the painting. They definitely don't want to download an app, create an account, or figure out location permissions.
This is where traditional app-based guides fall short. They demand setup friction that older users often skip—they'll hand the phone back rather than debug Bluetooth or location services. Web-based guides accessed via QR code skip the friction entirely.
A hearing aid is not a headphone. When your visitor tries to connect her aid to your audio guide app and it doesn't work, she's not going to spend 15 minutes troubleshooting. She'll turn it off and rely on whatever backup audio (or lack thereof) you've planned.
Bluetooth direct streaming to hearing aids—called direct audio input or DAI—only works if the app supports it explicitly. Not all apps do. Many older visitors still use older hearing aid models that require telecoil compatibility instead. Some have been fitted with newer aids that can stream but don't know how to enable it.
What works:
One historic site in England switched to a web-based guide with explicit hearing aid compatibility info and saw hearing aid users jump from 8% of their recorded guide listeners to 22%. Not because older visitors suddenly started using guides more. Because guides finally worked for them.
Large default text isn't a luxury. It's an accessibility requirement. Aim for 16px base font size—that's 100% on standard browsers—with the option to go larger. Many older users have set their phone's default font to 120% or 150%. Your guide needs to scale with that, not fight against it.
Outdoor venues have another problem: glare. A phone screen in bright daylight is hard to read at any age, but it's worse when your pupils aren't as responsive. Dark mode on outdoor screens makes a massive difference—white text on black is easier to read in sunlight than black text on white. If your site is outdoors or has large sun-facing windows, make dark mode the default.
A garden tour app that defaulted to a 16px sans-serif font with dark mode saw completion rates jump 34% among visitors over 65. The same improvements didn't show up for younger cohorts, who were already scrolling through fine. That's the whole point—optimize for your actual audience.
The best audio guides for older visitors talk first, then offer menus. Not the other way around.
An older visitor doesn't want to pick "Room 3" from a list. She wants the guide to tell her when she's in Room 3, and then offer her a choice: hear more about the painting, or move to the next room? That's voice-first design.
This is why spatially aware AI audio guides work so well for older audiences. You don't navigate the guide—the guide navigates you through the space. The visitor walks to a new room. The guide notices and starts talking about that room. No decision required except whether to listen or move on.
Compare this to a app where every single piece of content is a menu option. That's decision fatigue. An older visitor will either stick to one path (defeating the purpose of a guide with branches) or give up and hand you the phone back.
Older visitors aren't always slower—but they do prefer different pacing. A 3-minute audio segment about a painting is usually too long. A 45-second introduction is better. If they want more, they can tap "Go deeper" and get 2-3 minutes of additional context.
You're not patronizing anyone by offering short-form content. You're offering choice. Younger visitors will often skip short segments and search for longer ones. Older visitors will appreciate not being trapped in a 5-minute monologue about provenance.
Content depth matters too. Historical accuracy is always important, but older visitors—particularly those with personal connections to the era or place—sometimes want more granular detail than a general guide provides. A stately home guide that includes an optional "wartime" deep-dive will appeal to visitors who lived through the period. A garden guide with optional plant identification segments will appeal to gardeners.
Simple tip: offer a "full story" version for users who want it, and a "highlights" version for first-time visitors. Let them choose.
Most sites can skip loaner devices entirely now. QR code + personal phone = no infrastructure to manage, no device returns, no cleaning and charging.
There are exceptions. If your venue is in a rural area with poor phone signal, or if you consistently serve visitors without smartphones (check your demographics), a small loaner pool makes sense. Keep it minimal: 15-25 devices for a 200-person-per-day site.
But don't treat loaner devices as a band-aid for a bad guide experience. If the guide doesn't work on personal phones, adding 20 slow Android tablets won't fix the problem. Build the guide to work on phones first. Then decide whether you need physical devices for anyone without them.
One additional consideration: if you do offer devices, make sure they're the ones your older visitors can actually hold and navigate. A large-screen tablet is easier for someone with arthritis or low vision than a phone.
A QR code at the entrance—or better yet, multiple QR codes placed throughout the venue—is the lowest-friction entry point for all visitors, but especially older ones.
The QR code skips the app download and account creation steps that so many older visitors skip entirely. It opens straight in their phone's browser. No login. No email verification. Just: scan here, hear about the space.
Make sure the landing page does three things:
A museum in Scotland redesigned their QR code landing page to include hearing aid pairing info in plain English, and hearing aid users went from 4 guide sessions per week to 24. Same guide technology. Different entry experience.
You might think multilingual support is just for big international venues. It's not. A family trip where grandma speaks Italian, her daughter speaks English, and they're visiting a heritage site in England—that's a real scenario. Grandma will choose the Italian guide. Her daughter will choose English.
For older visitors specifically, language accessibility intersects with hearing loss. Someone with hearing loss in their non-native language will struggle more than someone with full hearing. A clear Italian voice guide beats a muffled English one for an older Italian speaker, every time.
Supporting 8-12 languages covers most scenarios at most Western heritage sites. 40+ languages (the reach of modern AI audio generation) is a bonus that costs you nothing to offer.
Once your guide is live, track actual completion data by age cohort. Not impressions. Not total sessions. Completion rates by age group.
You'll likely find that visitors over 65 complete guides at lower rates than younger visitors—not because they're less interested, but because the experience was built for 45-year-olds with perfect hearing. Once you optimize for your older audience, that gap closes.
One venue tracked completion rates by decade of age and found:
After redesigning for hearing aid compatibility, large text, and voice-first navigation:
That's a real impact on visitor experience—and on how much of your content actually gets heard.
Some older visitors will never use an audio guide, no matter how good it is. That's fine. A printed pamphlet with the same information—key stories from each room, organized spatially—is a legitimate alternative that costs you nothing.
Don't design your audio guide around the assumption that everyone will use it. Design it well. Offer a paper version. Let visitors choose. Most of your older visitors will choose the audio guide if it actually works for them.
The audio guides that work best for older visitors work well for everyone. Large text helps people with low vision of all ages. Hearing aid compatibility helps people with hearing loss of all ages. Voice-first navigation helps visitors who want minimal screen time, period.
You're not building a separate guide for older visitors. You're building a thoughtfully designed guide that happens to serve all visitors better when you start with accessibility as a requirement, not an afterthought.
A historic house, a botanical garden, a museum with older demographics—these venues can turn a guide from frustrating to delightful by asking one simple question: would this work for my 70-year-old grandmother? If the answer is no, fix it before launch.
readTimeMinutes: 8 audience: b2b
Q: Do I really need Bluetooth hearing aid compatibility, or is regular audio output enough?
A: It depends on your audience. If you serve visitors without hearing aids, regular audio output is sufficient. If you serve regular hearing aid users (ask during visitor surveys, or watch for people adjusting hearing aids), Bluetooth support is worth the setup cost. You don't need to support every hearing aid model, just the most common ones. Start with Phonak and ReSound—they cover about 60% of the market.
Q: What if my older visitors don't have smartphones?
A: Check your actual numbers. Ask visitors at the door: "Do you have a smartphone?" You'll probably find more than you expect. For the ones who don't, a small loaner pool (15-25 devices) works better than trying to design a separate guide system. But don't assume every older visitor is phoneless—most aren't anymore.
Q: Is a 45-second audio segment too short? Won't people want longer stories?
A: Not if you offer branching. A 45-second introduction followed by optional deeper dives gives visitors choice. Younger visitors will skip the intro and tap "Tell me more." Older visitors will often listen to the intro and move on—and that's fine. You're not losing engagement; you're matching pacing to preference. Data usually shows completion rates go up when you offer choice.
Q: How much does Bluetooth hearing aid support cost to implement?
A: In development time, roughly 2-3 weeks to test and verify across common models. In ongoing costs, almost zero. It's just proper audio API implementation—not a special feature that requires licensing. The real cost is the testing: you need to work with actual hearing aids and possibly an audiologist for 30 minutes of validation. That's $200-500, not thousands.
readTimeMinutes: 8 audience: b2b
Older visitors aren't a niche demographic—they're a core audience for heritage sites, gardens, churches, and historic houses. An audio guide that works for them is an audio guide that works well for everyone. If you're building a guide for a venue with older visitor demographics, start with the fundamentals: hearing aid compatibility, large text, voice-first interaction, and sensible pacing. The rest will follow.
If you're exploring audio guide options for your site, we'd be happy to walk through how your specific venue could serve your audience better.