How important are mobile devices to your students?

Published By:

Exactly how important are mobile devices to your students?

Let’s look at some solid, credible data to find out.

OFCOM published its Access and Inclusion in 2016 report, in March this year (2017).

The report looks at how disability and other factors affect access and inclusion to communications products and services in the UK market.

Here are some of the key findings that are relevant for you:

93% of 16 – 24 year olds use a smartphone for personal use – this is a whopping 20% greater than the UK average (73%) for the total population
97% of 16 – 24 year olds use the internet anywhere – this is a 10% more than the UK average (87%) for the total population

And…

57% of disabled people owned a smart phone in 2016, up from 41% in 2014
46% of disabled people owned a tablet in 2016, up from 30% in 2014

These two figures for smart phone and tablet ownership are both well below the national averages for non-disabled people.

But, they show the substantial growth in the number of disabled people who use mobile devices with internet connections.

Now let’s look at the OFCOM Communications Market Report 2017, which was published last Thursday (3/8/2017).

According to the report:

“For most people, mobile devices are their most important device for accessing the internet.

“Consistent with high take-up, more than four in ten (42%) UK internet users, including nearly two-thirds of 16-34 year olds and 44% of 35-54s, regard their smartphones as their most important device for accessing the internet.” (pp 164)

What does this data mean for you?

All this data shows just how important mobile devices are to your students. They use mobile devices to access information and enjoy accessing the internet from anywhere to suit their needs.

And let’s remember that about one in five people in the UK have some form of disability.

So can your disabled students access all the digital learning materials you need them to read to learn?

Can they go online and access any website or report they need to read?

As the Access and Inclusion report says:

“Although internet access among disabled people increased from 65% in 2014 to 79% in 2016, disabled consumers are much more likely than the population as a whole to face exclusion issues as a result of not being online.” (pp 10)

And accessibility is often a key barrier that stops disabled people going online more.

That’s where we can help you and your students.

We can help your students to access digital information

Include Me is cloud-based accessibility software that is designed for education.

It offers a wide range of accessibility and language features on mobile devices, because it’s what your students want and need.

These options make any piece of digital content accessible to any disabled student. That means anything from a word document used to write essays, to a report or website.

For example, Include Me’s phonetic speller tool spots the most unusual miss-spellings, which regular spell-checkers would not recognise.

It then offers spelling corrections to select the correct replacement word for a document.

And the homophone checker finds words within a document that sound the same but can have different meanings.

Both tools are incredibly helpful for students with dyslexia and other learning difficulties – they can help them read and write what they need to.

The colour overlay tool is great for students who have a visual impairment such as part or full sight-loss, or for those who are colour-blind.

Your students can also use Include Me’s other options to: have text read aloud, access a full English dictionary and download selected text from a website or document so they can listen anytime on the go.

Include Me also has a translation tool that will let your students translate a website into over 100 languages.

Documents can also be translated into a number of different languages.