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... so we all had coffee, the guide dogs had a fight in the corridors, and we were back in session. I went to two talks late morning: one on access to mobile services and another on the web and older people.

Interesting findings from Abilitynet's Veronika Jermolina on mobile phones - from a field study she did in 2008.

She didn't concentrate on deep internet codey techie talk like the earlier presentation
- some of which was a bit fast movingly dry and pitched very high. No, Veronika took a holistic view of the whole mobile phone experience from purchase to use. First you choose a handset, a network, then you may need assistive technology and after that it's all about the accessibility of the various services. If all these don't gel or work well, disabled people, especially the visually impaired subset, can fare really rather badly.

She noted visually impaired people had a good community setup and were far more likely to buy a phone based on recommendations of others in their situation rather than from a salesperson in a shop. Absolutely! What self respecting blindie isn't on the Access-UK mailing list? I'd far rather someone else went on the learning curve rather than me.

One big thing was that Veronika was very keen to have mobile phone shops displaying real phones rather than dummy phones in their stores. Nice to see the size and shape, yes, but disabled people will want to test out the text size, handlability, etc. Too true V'ronika, I hate that in moby shops ... it's like you're talking my language.

Crucially, she went on, mobile sites didn't have very usable or accessible pages detailing their pay structures ... which she figured was a big reason why people aren't using mobile internet. It can be very expensive you know, like 4 quid a day before you even realise you're spending money!!! Only 42% of her sample user set used the mobile net as opposed to 97% who used the phone to make calls and 91% for SMS text messaging we all know and love.

This study was done in 2008. However, it's my personal perception that my blind brethren, at least, have really picked up and run with mobile internet the last year since we all sussed Facebook was too damn hard to use on our computers.

Even later in the morning was a session from Andrew Arch about how older people use the internet.

It's perhaps unsurprising to find that his studies revealed that older people and disabled people share a lot of the same difficulties when it comes to using the web. But one interesting thing he mentioned was that older people didn't grow up with computers, didn't use them for leisure nor in the office, so it's hard to quantify where inaccessibility starts and a lifetime of no computer experience kicks in and just muddies the waters. And is that actually relevant anyway? Interesting but ... relevant? Older people are using the web in the same ways as us all for many things: social reasons, ecommerce (especially when leaving the house becomes an issue), local services, banking and all that.
Emma Tracey went to other sessions and will be with you in a while ... more from me at Techshare tomorrow. Ciao.