The Quality of Life

I just spent the weekend with my father, who is 95, mentally alert with severely impaired vision and eyesight. Over the past several months I have been struggling to find a device or device that he can operate and will give him access to digital media. This is about keeping an active mind active and avoiding frustration which is the typical barrier to all the gadgets we of the digital age now treasure. Audiobooks would be an ideal medium, but he needs to be able to download, start/stop, and make selections. With our ipods and smart phones we sometimes seem to ignore the simple fact that what works for many of us as "easier" is "harder" for those who's abilities are impaired. We made progress today by connecting headphones to a CD player, but the CD player can only be operated by a miniature remote--where the buttons are small the locations seemingly random and the frustration level extremely high.

While I'm sure we (my sister and I) will find improvements that allow him to enjoy and without extreme effort some of the things we take for granted, the fact that we take them for granted is itself a problem. For many of us "quality of life" means work/family balance, financial security and the ability to choose what we do, we will soon join the generation where our quality of life will be determined by simpler and more day-to-day issues. We should remember that and strive to make accessibility as important as availability and usability.