The trial of aging...and I don't mean my aging

When I started this blog, I was 45 and feeling life was finally settling down and it really has. Aside from getting hit by a car the worse thing to happen to us is the passing of our canine companion. That's likely to change soon as our surviving parents are past their mid-eighties and deal with hearing/vision/mobility loss. It sure seems like life has changed to make things as annoying as possible for them and really shines a light on accessibility.

While we celebrate online accessibility, in no way is this seamless for seniors who don't have someone computer literate to help them. For instance, my dad decided he wanted to donate an old vehicle to Kidney Car - a group I'd never heard of. I had to search, make sure I hit the right link, fill in the information, etc. My dad is vision impaired to the point of near blindness and crusty. His wife is busy working and doesn't seem that good with reading comprehension. This took about 5 minutes to complete but would have taken him ages.

My dad can't easily dial phones so I thought I'd set up an old Google Home for him so he can just ask it to call people. Google seems to use Duo unless you just tell it the number. He doesn't have a cell phone or Google account. His wife doesn't have a Google account. His contacts don't use Duo. This is annoying. We're with Alexa (despite Jeff Bezos) and it just didn't seem as big a deal to set up.

The worse is his hearing aid. I'm pretty convince hearing aids are a big scam. Elderly people keep getting sold hearing aids for thousands of dollars that they use pretty inconsistently because they tickle or their voice echoes or some other reason. Dad's hearing aids came with a plastic remote, but he used his wife to change the volume because it wasn't set up and he didn't have the dexterity to press the buttons. The remote is poorly designed for elderly people with flat buttons that have no click or edge, one little nipple to landmark a programmable middle button that wasn't programmed (probably a good thing).

And I get it, old people are annoyed because things have changed but pretty well nothing is meeting expectations and they can't get it resolved. They don't seem to be able to answer questions and if you can't understand, they just get irritable. And service people have to learn to not to take things personally which can be hard.

We really need a diverse group of designers for all equipment and tools. It can only benefit all of us.