Our new tech masters treat the elderly and frail with total disdain

The more I see of old age, the more I marvel that the elderly are not (yet) rioting on the streets. Perhaps it’s a generational thing: the last of the stiff-upperlippers, they seem to endure with extraordinary resignation the anxieties, frustrations and humiliations that come with being old in a world so at odds with their needs.

The writer Pete Paphides described in a series of tweets this week how his father, trying to park outside a church, got in a panic when ordered to pay on an app. Worried about being late for a friend’s memorial service, he asked his son to ring the parking firm, explain that he didn’t have any apps, and arrange to pay the fee some other way. But Paphides couldn’t find a human being to talk to, a fine was issued, and now – a month after his father’s death – Paphides is still trying to settle the issue with a debt recovery service.

Digital technology has transformed our social infrastructure, making many transactions faster and smoother for those who can handle a smartphone with ease. But the logistical landscape we now live in – one where humans and tactile objects have been replaced by touchscreens, apps and bots – is peculiarly hostile to anyone living with the ordinary side-effects of old age.

My mother, for example, is going blind. This is not unusual: around one in three people over 65 has some kind of visionreducing eye disease.

Precisely because it is such a common disability, you might think new technology would be designed to accommodate it.

Almost everything my mother needs is locked inside either her smartphone or her computer: her bank, her bills, her medical records, emails, train tickets, online shopping and the rest. But she can’t see her computer screen without tilting the monitor until it is two inches from her nose.

Even then, she can’t find the tiny cursor for her mouse, or see the pale grey boxes into which she is supposed to type her passwords.

An IT fixer came round and made her font bigger. But most web pages aren’t designed to accommodate big font, which means she can only see a fragment of a page at a time.

She veers between fury and self-reproach, cursing her own incompetence. But it’s hardly her fault that the vast majority of the internet has been designed without the elderly or disabled in mind.

A US study of the top one million websites worldwide found that 98 per cent of web pages did not meet international standards of accessibility. There were an average of 61 accessibility failures per page, with the most common being low contrast, missing text and missing links: just the kind of thing that drives my mother to despair.

Some new tech, such as smart speakers, can be enormously helpful for the visually impaired. But the digitisation of ordinary domestic gadgets, such as washing machines and cookers, has only created a new layer of difficulty. Instead of buttons, knobs and dials, which can be found through touch and which click informatively under the fingers, users must now navigate the smooth, taciturn surface of yet another touchscreen.

Do the people who design these things have no parents or grandparents, I wonder? Or is it only empathy that they lack?