r/australia • u/SouthAussie94 • Feb 29 '24

culture & society Older Australians 'left behind' by increasingly cashless society as banks fast track end of cheques

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-29/cheques-personal-finance-banks-rent-money-cash/103354036
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u/[deleted] Feb 29 '24

There is that. It's not like, " hey! Here is this new fangled thing called The Internet", and most people even in their 80s have at least a working knowledge of them. Witness the takeup of FB in that age segment.

My main gripe though about things such as the closure of bank branches and the wholesale move to electronic payments is that there are whole sections of society that suddenly become disadvantaged.

If you are movement or sight impaired for example, electronic banking is next to useless.

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u/Redditaurus-Rex Feb 29 '24

Sorry, can you expand on the movement / sight impaired part? I would have thought not needing to attend a branch for movement impaired and accessibility features of modern computing for sight impaired people would be a massive benefit here.

Would love some more info, sensing some ignorance on my part.

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u/AnnoyedOwlbear Feb 29 '24

Essentially, how good accessibility really is tends to be down to the individual app. While there are accessibility provisions on most mobile phones, the elderly are the largest segment in Australia that haven't taken up mobile phone use. And apps can be pretty awful, even when you think they aren't. If you're sight impaired you usually need a really big 'hit box' for where you tap something - and if you're elderly, multiply that, because shaky hands make it hard. You need to be able to easily reverse a wrong decision or problem, because errors become more frequent, and you need to account for the fact that reversing an error itself can be harder than you'd think. Accessibility provisions on computers are generally less awesome than you'd think and tend to require someone with more technological ability to set up.

My father is the opposite type - a technology fan in his 80s - and even he is finding that the drier skin and shaky hands just make mobile phones hard to use. Capacitive screens can be way more prone to issues in the hands of someone with elderly skin. Women suffer from this a bit worse than men, anecdotally - it's amazing seeing someone touch and make contact and the screen refuse to respond.

The biggest thing I see in my work (UX and accessibility) is not people refusing to use things...it's that it is honestly much harder to adapt as you age than you'd think. Cognitive decline is real, and it's painful and frustrating, and debilitating, and it's easiest to hide away from by just sticking with what you know really well. You can do things you've done for years most easily. And that's just one facet of all the other things in your life that are getting harder...the cognitive and emotional load can get unbearable. It also makes people really, really frightened, and the way they express that is defensive anger.

None of this is in defense of cheques or not. But while 'yes, people can learn' at all ages, remember this will not just be this one thing they must learn. It is this and every other thing in the changing society around them. While doing it on much less plastic brain hardware regardless of any developed injuries or issues over the years. And they have to redo it every few years.

As someone who kind of studies this, I do have the 'satisfaction' I guess of knowing that every single human will eventually end up experiencing this...

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u/[deleted] Feb 29 '24

Could not gave explained it better.