There's an article today on the ABC's website about how older people, especially those in rural and regional Australia, are having increasing difficulty in accessing services as they move online.
Some of the reasons are predictable, lack of a decent internet connection, not owning a laptop, etc.
It's what in the 2000's we used to call digital disenfranchisement, and we used to worry about how students from poorer backgrounds would cope with an increasing move to online learning, and without having decent access to online resources.
Well, I suspect it's still a problem for some students, but at least we can now be reasonably confident that they have the basic skills to carry out a web search, access wikipedia, fill in an online form, or create and share a Google Docs document.
For older people, that's not the case.
They never learned to use a computer or acquire the bag of cultural skills that means that they can find their way round a windows manager, add a new wifi connection (one thing I've learned from being involved with the Athenaeum is that a lot of family history people, while they can download and annotate docments and do lots of clever things, connecting to wifi is something that they don't know how to do - someone set it up for them at home, so they never learned), deal with a different text editor, do markup, or indeed deal with a different note taking application.
They simply never learned. And remember these are overwhelmingly motivated intelligent individuals, but I do have to say that a lot of them are around my age, which I regret to admit is seventy.
Now I am different from a lot of people in my age group.
In the 1980s I did IT support for botanists and wildlife scientists at a field research station, and then later on more general IT support for a large research orientated university.
This was at a time when desktop computing was beginning to become common and a lot of researchers needed a little bit of help, be it choosing a laptop to take out into the field (literally in the case of botanists, archaeologists and geologists), setting up a device, installing software, or indeed just some basic text processing skills.
At the time there a lot of different applications and different computer systems, so I learned pretty rapidly to find my way round various bits of software.
Basically I'm a hack.
Most people in my age group are not.
A lot of what they have learned is by means of magic spells - want to pay a bill online? Well you click here, add the payee's account details here, click confirm, type in the amount here, set the payment date with this calendar widget, click confirm for a second time, review the details, and click OK.
And we don't make it easy for them. My bank has two different calendar widgets in their online banking system, and which one you get depends on whether it's a person to person transfer or a bill payment.
I'm going to guess that a lot of people don't understand that to the bank, a person to person transfer is different from a bill payment, so it's processed by different software system written and maintained by a different team who decided to use a different calendar widget. And why should they know this?
And I could go on. Want to report a hazard to my local council? Well, you fill in an online form that asks you a lot of questions, name, street address, phone number, email address, before asking you to select a hazard type from a pick list (tree down, flooded street drain, etc) and submit a trouble ticket.
It does at least have an 'Other' category with a 128 character free form text entry field - useful when the hazard is a dead fox lying in the middle of a residential street.
I could go on and on. Medicare, Vehicle registration, the Tax office, they're all online, and they all want information presented in a different way, and if you've only learned magic spells, you're lost.
Likewise showing people how to do things doesn't really help them, it's just another magic spell, it doesn't build the skills to navigate online systems.
What we really need is a set of common design guidelines, like the early Mac user interface design manuals, that mean that everything looks the same, the menus have the same names and the options are the same - this was really they key to the early success of Apple computers - everything just worked, and worked the same way. (I once helped a visiting Korean researcher install a printer on her Korean language Mac, not because of any Korean language skills on my part, but simply because the menu options were in the same order as in the English language version of the operating system).
Sure, information literacy training would help. But most training available for seniors is task oriented, that brings us back to the world of magic spells.
And remember, quite often it's our older citizens that need to access the pensions office, Medicare, book a doctor's appointment, or lodge an escript with a pharmacy, or even borrow ebooks from the library, something that needs quite a bit of skill, and I can't help feeling that better interface design would help.
And of course, if you can't do these things, and always have to get one of the grandkids to help you, you end up in a state of learned helplessness.
And it's happened to me.
Some time round about 1986 a girlfriend and I decided to take a train to the Spanish border from London.
At that time the only way you could only book an overseas train ticket for travel in the next day or two was directly from a British Rail office in Victoria station in London. Amazingly, no other BR booking offices could process international bookings, and if you wanted an onward ticket from England, you had to get the train to London and then line up for a boat train ticket and a connecting SNCF ticket for onward travel in France.
It was almost as if, having understandably withdrawn the international booking service in 1940, they were yet to fully reinstate it.
Admittedly, some travel agents could book international tickets as well, but it took them days to do it.
Now, British Rail could book you a ticket on French Railways, but not on Spanish trains, that you had to do yourself at the station in Irun, if you wanted to go further into Spain or Portugal.
The other thing British Rail could not do was sell us a seat reservation, our tickets only allowed us to get on the train, but they airily assured us that SNCF could reserve a seat for us at the Gare d'Austerlitz up to an hour before departure, subject to availability of course.
Well that might well have been the case, but when we got to the Gare d'Austerlitz, after about four hours sleep on the overnight boat train from London, the booking office clerk told us 'C'est tout electronique, utilisez le minitel publique' and gestured at a row of terminals in the booking hall.
Well we tried. The terminals had AZERTY keyboards, and the system was only in French. After ten minutes swearing we gave up and decided to chance being able to get two unreserved seats together. We stood most of the way to Bordeaux...
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