The design of accessible and usable mobile services for low literate users

Visual interfaces as an approach for providing mobile services and mobile content to low literate users in South Africa

“…al. [6], and this is reiterated here. "The relevance cycle bridges the environment to the design research activities, the rigor cycle bridges the design research activities with the knowledge base and finally the design cycle is contained in the design research activities and is involved in building artifacts and evaluating them for relevance" [6].…”

“…Matyila, Botha, Alberts and Sibiya [6] establish that there is a need to design mobile services and mobile content usable and accessible to low literate users. In South Africa, similar to developed and other developing countries, the numbers of low literate users make up a considerable user base which potentially lacks usable access to mobile services and mobile content [21,1,7,17].…”

“…al. [6] and [31] and also typical attributes of a text intensive mobile service and text intensive mobile content and show that through redesign from text based to using visual interfaces, the resulting mobile applications provide usable access to low literate users.…”

“…Such mobile devices include but are not limited to smartphones and related variants -phablets, feature phones and tablet computers. Future trends in mobile services and content is directed towards smartphones and variants with these devices providing extensive support to data services [6]. Consequently the current research acknowledges but will not involve feature phones and lower.…”

“…According to the Millennium Development Goals Report 2010 [31] low literacy occurs when individuals have at most grade 6 or 7 of formal schooling. Matyila, Botha, Alberts and Sibiya [6] relate low literacy in individuals to the literacy skills they possess in their day to day needs. Typically these users may be individuals employed in low levels of farming, mining, or even casual informal employment with limited education requirements.…”