Although our two studies were based

Although our two studies were based on a small number of users we found consistently how proficient illiterate users were in navigating and using their mobile phones – be it low-end, feature or smart phones. Since two out of three users in study 2 had iPhones already, our results were biased compared to users who had never used smartphones before but it added to the existing evidence that using a smartphone proficiently is not a cognitive matter but a matter of habits. Illiterate users who are used to smartphones can be as proficient as literate users in using their mobile phones at least for the functions that are important to them. Similar to Lalji & Good’s finding in which participants were uncomfortable with touch screens our feature phone owner from Angola, despite encouragement was disinclined to touch the phone. In the few cases when she did her styled, long and curved fingernails made interactions with the touch screen seem a little awkward because they would click on the screen first and the angle for touching was quite low. But both iPhone users had no problem interacting with our touch screen based application whatsoever and with initial explanations managed to compose messages successfully. Like Medhi et al., we do not believe this to be a cognitive issue since the other two participants were confident using the touch screen even with an application that they had no previous experience with. Before testing touch-screen applications users need to be taught the basics of touch screen interaction. In contrast to Katre’s study, our participants had no problems using their index fingers for interacting with the touch screen although some of the icons were relatively small. We are aware that these differences with Katre’s observations might be due to the difference between our users (Swiss immigrants from developing countries) and the rural farmers he studied.As can be expected, the icons we used – although carefully chosen- were not self-explanatory. Each participant had his own representation of an idea. Audio support for icons was helpful to avoid misinterpretations especially when seeing them for the first time. Additionally, any mistakes could easily be corrected by deleting erroneously added words from the editor. The corpus of icons was limited but we hope that this will provide an initial entry point for illiterate users to create words through which they can express themselves. Obviously a speech recognition facility could be more versatile and powerful. The participants struggled with the concept of multi-sentence icons. For the pre-listen version none our participants understood that the numbers “1, 2, 3” corresponded to the number of times they had to tap on the icon to add the sentence to the message editor. Thus, after long-tapping on the icons and listening to the three options, the users did not know what to do since the voice prompts did not provide any action cues. Instead of having the rather abstract guideline “One: I will be late. Two: …” we should have given an action cue such as “Tap this icon once for I will be late, tap it twice for…”. The combined prompts were too long and in hindsight reminded us of Medhi et al.’s recommendations about short and simple audio instructions [12]. Our participants did not succeed in memorizing the three different meanings for a single icon. Once reminded of the sentence and that the numbers corresponded on how many times they had to tap on the icon, their main problem was that there was no feedback on how many times they had already tapped on the icon. This behavior was also inconsistent with how words and regular icons responded to taps. Compared to voice mail or voice-based SMS services (e.g. India’sVoiceSMS) our application offers additional value. In voice mail,
users need to have network access to compose a new SMS, with our application however, users can review and compose their SMS offline. Standard SMS are cheap or even free (e.g. a hundred SMS per day) as part of certain prepaid contracts. Most importantly voice mails offer no potential learning whereas our application provides an audio-visual matching between text and audio, which can represent a source of learning for users. According to Srivastava [20] an India NGO has started encouraging women to buy mobile phones English because of the potential to learn various alphabets through them. We do not want to claim that illiterate users will learn how to read and write with this application alone. But we see potential for it in providing additional encounters with text with concrete short-term goals providing reading practice and thereby incentivizing and catalyzing literacy acquisition. Particularly the fact that our participants were not able to identify words after removing the karaoke function convince us that illiterate, neo-literate and semiliterate users will find this application helpful. Every day exposure to text in conjunction with audio in same language subtitles of movie content was also shown to improve reading and writing skills in neo-literates [7]. Semi-literates in Findlater et al.’s study benefited from combination of text and audio and had superior word recognition at the end of each session after the second day of use [3].Chipchase recommended that phones for illiterates should not be recognizable as such because of the associated stigma [2]. The only thing that might reveal a user’s illiteracy to by-standers while using our application is the sound played when tapping on words and icons. This can be mitigated by headphone use. Moreover, all the SMS sent from our application are regular SMS. If an EasyTexting user sends an SMS there will be no way for the recipient to know that it was written with an application for illiterates. Recruiting and running studies with illiterate users in Western countries is a challenge since they are not numerous and since they usually try to hide their illiteracy. Our way to get in contact with them was via schools. Establishing initial contacts with the schools and to gain the trust of the staff and teachers took time. Partly, they wanted to make sure we were going to treat their students with respect and without a patronizing attitude. Despite the testimonials of teachers only some of the students volunteered to participate despite remuneration. Almost all of our participants were financially relying on their partners.