Re: Old Age and Accessibility

> 
> These are both symptoms of a fear of doing things wrong.

A relevant article came up on the BBC News web site today. According 
to a survey commissioned by Computeractive magazine, 42% of UK adults
are too scared of PCs to have ever used one.  Of those who have
used them, many are not interested in learning more about them.

I would suggest that the proportion is much higher than 42% in the
age group in question, so the sample in the surveys referenced would
actually be atypical of the age group in actually having some basic
knowledge of PCs (in fact, unless they had more than basic knowledge,
most of their problems would be in learning the GUI, rather than 
operating the site).

I think one might generalise the "not wanting to learn more" finding
to not being bothered to install modern language support.

The main URL is:

BBC NEWS  Technology  Britons still 'scared' of computers

 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/technology/3158170.stm>

They also had it as today's discussion point, although I didn't read much
except to get a general view that computers are seen as difficult to
learn:

BBC NEWS  Have Your Say  Are you scared of computers

 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/talking_point/3161106.stm>

These are the low graphics (Betsy) versions.  Replace low by hi for the
standard versions.

Received on Friday, 3 October 2003 17:31:34 UTC