Even Flow..

For over 1.5 years now, I've been doing some voluntary work. Every week, I swim with visually impaired people. I pick them up by car and we drive to a swimming pool in another city. The group of people is quite large and it feels like some kind of community.  It's actually not about swimming, but more about social interaction. Over the last 1.5 years, I've gotten to know quite some people and often have very interesting discussions about the abilities and disabilities of the visually impaired. What really surprised me is the technology adoption level of most of the people I talk to. Almost everybody uses email and mobile phones to communicate. The youngest in the group is 23 years old and the oldest is over 85. Even the people that could easily be my grand parents use email all the time and browse the Internet a lot. I don't know a lot of people over 65 that are so actively involved in tech.

Since I am the proud owner of an iPhone, I handed my new gadget to some people last week and the reactions were quite interesting. Of course, this device is utterly useless for people that can't see (well), since there is only one button on the thing, that doesn't even allow you to call. Now, I notice a lot of touch screen devices appearing lately. Samsung, LG and Noka, among others have neat devices with just a piece of plastic that is used for user interaction. My guess is that in a couple of years, all phones will have touch displays and no more buttons. The same happened with color displays. Some years ago, there were only phones with black/white displays, but nowadays, there aren't a lot of these devices on the market anymore. I'm very curious to see how phone buttons evolve and if there are any manufacturers that keep an eye on visually impaired people. Maybe this is such a small market that it's not profitable, so only smaller companies will produce special (expensive) devices, but I hope not.

It's interesting to see how a whole group of people sometimes is just left out. In 2001, a similar thing happened with the Euro notes. Before, we had the Guilder (Gulden in Dutch) and on every bank note, there were dots of ink that you would be able to feel and would tell you what the value of the note was. This is currently not the case for Euro notes. There is no way to tell what value the note has, except by it's size. The higher the value, the bigger the note, but without any comparison, it's not easy to tell what kind of note you have, without seeing it. The difference between a 20 Euro and a 50 Euro note for example isn't that distinguishable. A lot of blind people carry special devices with which they can measure the size of the note, but obviously, this is very inconvenient. I really don't understand why the good idea of putting dots on a note wasn't inherited when the Euro was introduced.