Sarah Sheffield, a nurse practitioner at a Veterans Affairs clinic in Eugene, Oregon, had a problem. Her patients — mostly in their 70s and beyond — couldn’t read computer screens. It’s not an unusual problem for older people, which is why you might think Oracle Cerner, the developers of the agency’s new digital health record system, would have anticipated it.
But they didn’t.
Federal law requires government resources to be accessible to patients with disabilities. But patients can’t easily enlarge the text. “They all learned to get strong reading glasses and magnifying glasses,” said Sheffield, who retired in early October.
