Accessibility, Availability and Affordability

Of these three, which is the largest obsta­cle to the free and open flow of online information?

Con­sider the following:

  1. A 12-year old boy in West­ern Africa has learned how to read Braille. He has also recently received an inex­pen­sive lap­top as part of a cor­po­rate ini­tia­tive to save the world with cheap com­put­ers. Unfor­tu­nately, he is unable to access the infor­ma­tion on his own because he was born blind and the com­puter did not come with any soft­ware that can read the con­tent of web pages.
  2. In rural Idaho a high school stu­dent has an inex­plic­a­ble desire to “make web­sites”. There are no tech­nol­ogy classes at her school, but a teacher allows her to use a school com­puter dur­ing the last part of lunch to prac­tice her craft. She has found a cou­ple of online com­mu­ni­ties that the school fil­ter allows where she is able to find answers to many of her ques­tions. After school she has a 50 minute bus ride to a small home at the bot­tom of a hill bor­der­ing a National For­est in Cen­tral Idaho. Her fam­ily does have an older com­puter, but they haven’t been able to find local Inter­net ser­vice provider.
  3. A young woman in Alba­nia con­stantly hears her friends talk about peo­ple that they have met online. She found a job at a local byrek stand where she earns enough money to accom­pany her friends to a local Inter­net Cafe to par­tic­i­pate in their online activ­i­ties. How­ever, her father recently lost his job because of ill­ness and her fam­ily expects her to con­tribute all of her earn­ings to the fam­ily pot. She occa­sion­ally gets a few min­utes to check her email by tag­ging along with her friends, but by and large she no longer able to use the Internet.

Each of the above prob­lems might be over­come with some com­bi­na­tion of tech­nol­ogy, aware­ness or money. How­ever, each sit­u­a­tion does present a prob­lem of acces­si­bil­ity, avail­abil­ity or afford­abil­ity that might be gen­er­al­ized to include a larger num­ber of people.

Which of these is the most sig­nif­i­cant obsta­cle to ubiq­ui­tous, afford­able tech­nol­ogy to allow every­one to con­nect to this vast col­lec­tion of tubes that we call the Internet?

What other obsta­cles keep peo­ple from access­ing the Internet?

  1. Scott Rains says:
    August 27, 2007 at 3:00 am

    Christo­pher,

    Three dif­fi­cult choices and I can’t say that I could fairly pri­or­i­tize them but I did want to wel­come you back to blog­ging reg­u­larly. I look for­ward to read­ing your insights.

    Scott

  2. Christopher Phillips says:
    August 27, 2007 at 8:30 pm

    Thanks for stop­ping by again Scott– it’s good to see a famil­iar name. I sup­pose you can’t really pri­or­i­tize which of the three is most impor­tant in gen­eral, although each is worth con­sid­er­ing when look­ing at spe­cific sit­u­a­tions where access is a problem.

  3. Dave says:
    August 31, 2007 at 8:56 am

    I run into many peo­ple who are forced to use tech­nol­ogy by their job, but have no inter­est or pre­vi­ous train­ing and end up drag­ging their feet the whole way. Can moti­va­tion be an obsta­cle? Or am I being pre­ten­tious to assume that every­one can ben­e­fit from using the Internet? : )

    There are also peo­ple in sit­u­a­tions sim­i­lar to #2, except they don’t have train­ing resources avail­able. Maybe they’ve obtained com­puter and Inter­net access, but they don’t know about search engines or the con­cept of dis­tinct web sites vs. the Inter­net as a whole and have no under­stand­ing of how any of it really works. They may or may not know how to find out more about these things, or even that these kinds of con­cepts and issues exist. There’s a lot of room for vari­a­tion here, some peo­ple have a really dif­fi­cult time wrap­ping their minds around the very log­i­cal way that com­put­ers work…the train­ing issue almost comes back around to an acces­si­bil­ity issue at that point.

  4. Guy Davies says:
    April 3, 2009 at 7:32 am

    I would have to agree with Scott (Hi Scott!) in that it is impos­si­ble to pri­ori­tise the three dif­fer­ent examples

    But in exam­ple 1, I would think that is the excep­tion; the vast major­ity of Africans (dis­abled or not) would prob­a­bly never have access to a com­puter, let alone web access. The cur­rent think­ing in Africa is that mobile phones will prob­a­bly be the most com­mon route for peo­ple in rural Africa to use to access the inter­net. that brings some new issues as few phones are acces­si­ble, an for basic func­tions, let alone wet brows­ing. I am not aware of a sta­ble, afford­able acces­si­ble web browser that can oper­ate on the typ­i­cal mobile phone oper­at­ing sys­tems. Many of the usual phones are only basic entry level.

    I can cer­tainly imag­ine eas­ier solu­tions to the sec­ond 2 examples.

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