TL;DR version: what’s the best setup for elderly people who are really bad with computers, but still want to use one?
My mom (in her eighties) still wants to use her computer, but it’s becoming too difficult to do just about anything she wants to do, which is check her email, pay bills, shop, and browse the internet. She says the computer is always changing on her, in ways she can’t fix – most recently, it seems the text size of everything has gotten smaller, and she can’t make it bigger. She’s holding up a magnifying glass to the screen at this point.
I’m thousands of miles away. It’s hard to help her with stuff like that over the phone, firstly because she never understands what she’s looking at. For example, she doesn’t know that you use a web browser (which might be Firefox or Chrome or Internet Explorer or what-have-you) to browse the internet. When she’s looking at a webpage, she doesn’t know it’s a webpage; it’s just stuff on the screen to her, whether it’s a PDF or a JPG on her hard drive, or an error message from Windows, or a file folder, or a webpage. All she knows is that stuff keeps breaking on her.
Not too long ago, she called in a panic because “My Amazon is gone.” Several difficult minutes of questioning later, I finally realized someone had set up a Start Menu button labeled “Amazon,” and that’s what she pressed when she wanted to go to Amazon.com. The button disappeared, and she had no idea that you could launch the web browser of your choice and type in Amazon.com in the browser’s address bar – these terms mean nothing to her. She doesn’t know that she has an Amazon account with a password, and the only reason she’s not required to log in and use the password is that the browser remembers it. Her personal method was to press a certain button, and when that failed, she was completely lost.
Same thing with bank billpay recently – and yes, it fills me with terror that she’s attempting any form of online banking – she had a button for Billpay, and when the bank changed the link, it broke, and she didn’t know to use a web browser and type in [bankname.com]. It’s a miracle she was eventually able to do this, and what’s more, successfully log in.
Some of you may be thinking at this point, with hearts full of pity, she’s getting too old to use a computer, and you wouldn’t be far wrong. She knows it, but asks plaintively, “isn’t there a computer for grandmas?” It seems to me that (as they do with cellphones) they ought to market super-easy-to-use computers to folks who need that, but I’m not sure they do. Computers are by their nature very complex machines. But so are phones, and there’s definitely Grandma Phones.
Of course what she really needs is somebody by her side to help her. I’ll happily buy her a machine and fly out there to set it up, but after I go home, the new machine will break again. Phone support doesn’t ever work because she’ll never phone me from the computer while she’s having the problems; it’s always an afterthought, after she’s become frustrated and stepped away from the screen. She’s never been willing to problem-solve together in the moment – she just wants it to work, that’s all.
For all these reasons I’m pretty sure there is no machine that could solve her problems. She really is too old to use a computer effectively. But is there a machine, a setup, an idea, a concept that could possibly help any? Do they still have AOL – is there a modern-day walled garden solution? Would a Mac be better than a PC? All ideas welcome.