Title: A Comparison of Mobile Money-Transfer UIs for Non-Literate and Semi-Literate Users
Authors: Indrani Medhi, S.N. Nagasena Gautama ,Kentaro Toyama
Pages: 10 pp.
Source: CHI 2009, April 4–9, 2009
Publisher: ACM
Date (published): Spring 2009
Date (accessed): 01/12/2009
Type of information: research paper
Language: English
On-line access: yes (pdf)
Abstract:
ABSTRACT
Due to the increasing penetration of mobile phones even into poor communities, mobile payment schemes could bring formal financial services to the “unbanked”. However, because poverty for the most part also correlates with low levels of formal education, there are questions as to whether electronic access to complex financial services is enough to bridge the gap, and if so, what sort of UI is best.
In this paper, we present two studies that provide preliminary answers to these questions. We first investigated the usability of existing mobile payment services, through an ethnographic study involving 90 subjects in India, Kenya, the Philippines and South Africa.
This was followed by a usability study with another 58 subjects in India, in which we compared non-literate and semi-literate subjects on three systems: text-based, spoken
dialog (without text), and rich multimedia (also without text). Results confirm that non-text designs are strongly preferred over text-based designs and that while task-completion rates are better for the rich multimedia UI, speed is faster and less assistance is required on the spoken-dialog system.
(via MobileActive.org )

Title: Websites that use the spoken word will empower the illiterate
Source: FARA Secretariat
Publisher: Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa
Date (published): 24/08/2009
Date (accessed): 27/08/2009
Type of information: blog post
Language: English
On-line access: yes (HTML)
Abstract:
"The internet, wonderful though it is, reinforces one of life’s fundamental divisions: that between the literate and the illiterate. Most websites, even those heavy with video content, rely on their users being able to read and—if interactive—write. Building your own site certainly does.

Guruduth Banavar, the director of IBM’s India Research Laboratory, wanted to allow people who struggle with literacy to create websites. So he and his colleagues have devised a system based on what is known as “voice extensible markup language”, a cousin of the hypertext markup language used on conventional websites, that allows a website to be built and operated more or less by voice alone."