Making (streams) Mom-resistantAdventures in using (streams) with my 97⅔-year-old mother...
I posted last year about using the Photos app to show pictures to my Mom, because it's about the simplest photo gallery software I've ever seen. Well, that worked, but only with lots of help over the phone, and Mom's mental sharpness continues to be in slow decline.
So I thought, let's try posts with photos. All she has to do is scroll down. It'll be easier. But I need to make it Mom-resistant.
So...
I made her background color sky-blue, so that individual posts will stand out in a more obvious way.
I made a new channel for myself, which only has Mom as a connection (and vice versa). I locked down her channel and mine (no ActivityPub, all security settings as restrictive as possible, default Audience set to "Friends", etc).
Every post starts with this:
To see everything, tap the little blue arrow ⌄ at the bottom of this box.
(It might take a few seconds before the arrow appears.)
I strip off the
[zrl]
tags from every photo, so that she can't tap a photo and end up in the Photos app in a new browser tab.
Every post ends with this:
To look at the newest stuff, tap the word Stream in the dark blue bar near the top.
Did it work? Well, not smoothly. And luckily my brother was available at her end to help her get past a few snags. But I'll declare Mom to be, probably, the oldest (streams) user on the planet.
What makes it so difficult?
- Mom has very limited ability to form new memories. So everything is unfamiliar, even if she had it explained 2 minutes ago.
- She has a longstanding mental block against all "computer stuff". Us kids and our late father have always done all the computer things, and she has been convinced for decades that she cannot learn it and doesn't need to.
- She has an uncanny ability to discover new software features, especially "gestures" to control her iPad. (How did she manage to get a screen containing a single photo and no functioning back-arrow?!)
- We look at our Stream and see a visually-simple layout. Mom sees a screenful of random stuff, and it's overwhelming. She has no idea what to scroll or what to tap, because -- for her brain -- it's just a jumble of words and icons and photos.
Anyway... partial success is still success.