Abstract
The world has a vast population of illiterate people who cannot read and write. There are globally about 781 million adults today who fall into this category of illiterate population. The number is even higher for computer illiterates, as not all literate masses qualify to be computer literate due to various compelling factors prevailing. There has been a lot of focus in recent times by both governmental and nongovernmental agencies to extend the proliferation of ICT among computer illiterates, especially in the rural areas. This focus is prevalent both worldwide and as well as in India. India has around 37% of world’s illiterate population. One of the major bottleneck and hindrance towards achieving penetration objective is due to the lack of a suitable Human Computer Interface (HCI) system addressing the specific needs of the computer illiterate section. In this study, we discuss the various aspects of input devices for this segment. We analyze the efficacy of a simplified numeric keypad as a HCI in an information dissemination system for computer illiterates specifically in the context of rural area usage.
Highlights
There has been an unprecedented expansion and proliferation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Internet in particular, since last couple of decades or so
In order to provide rural illiterate people all the information which can be in text or graphical format, it is necessary that user interface is graphical and input device should be able to deal with that interface (Medhi et al, 2011)
During development of a rural information dissemination system, we have developed a simplified numeric keypad that collaboratively work with our designed User Interface (UI) and provided synergic result in terms of ease of usage to the end users (Table 1)
Summary
There has been an unprecedented expansion and proliferation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Internet in particular, since last couple of decades or so. The design of input devices considering the cognitive abilities of intended users and prevailing rural eco system is major challenge. In this study we discuss and scrutinize various aspects of HCI and input devices for computer illiterates in rural ICT and analyze the suitability of a simplified numeric keypad in this context and use-case scenario.
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