Jacob Neilson helps us Get to know the low-literacy web user.
I disagree with some things that come out of alertbox. This article opened my eyes to some interesting insights into how low-literacy web users navigate a page - what information they get and what they don’t get.

I think it can be taken one step further. Instead of thinking of a user as either a high-literate or a low-literate think of them terms relative to the content of the page. Documents heavy with jargon, difficult concepts or excessive detail makes a document more difficult to comprehend. This in turn increases the literacy level required to scan the document. If scanning becomes ineffective, then a user normally regarded as a ‘high-literacy user’ has to resort to reading word-by-word. You can turn a high-literate user into a low-literate user by increasing the vocabulary requirements of a document. It’s all relative to the document.

I haven’t done clinical tests on this theory. I do know it’s true of me whenever I attempt to comprehend something over my head.

I find that often my colleagues and I assume that they way we surf the web = the way that most people surf the web. When you think about it, it’s not true at all. It is easy to use skewed perceptions to formulate false assumptions. If not for the over-abundance of statistics to the contrary, I think that people might assume things like “that everyone I know uses Firefox, so most people must use Firefox“.

If you want to market a service or a product to as wide an audience as possible, then you should keep the literacy-level of your target audience in mind or you risk abandoning the long tail.

How many low-literacy users do you think have a blog?