E-Including the Illiterate

Abstract

In present-day society, we communicate over the Internet in several media forms. We put videos and images online, listen to music made by famous bands or by our friends, and read and write a lot of text. Never in the history of mankind have we produced more text than at this present moment, so being able to read and write is an important way of taking part in our society. We tend to forget that, even in our educated communities, not all people can read or write and there exist several degrees of literateness. People with reduced cognitive capacities and those migrating from cultures with a different language, or even a completely different writing system, are excluded from fully taking part in written online communication: they are e-excluded.