Is digital divide growing by design?
By Bob Sullivan Posted on ZDNet News: Apr 4, 2001 12:00:00 AM There is a growing digital divide, but it’s not exactly between rich and poor–it’s really between the computer enabled and the computer disabled. And the ranks of the disabled are much wider than you might think. That was the message hovering in the room this week as thousands of computer software designers descended on Seattle–in part to deliver the message personally to Microsoft’s Bill Gates. For the 18th year, experts in human-computer interfaces gathered to complain about the current state of software design, and to present research on radical changes to the way people and machines might manage to just get along. There were the usual radical interface ideas, such as a personal digital assistant with a mouse pointer that moved around the screen by tilting it – akin to the way an egg slides around a frying pan, according to its designer. But in Seattle this year, alongside booths bragging of better wireless Web browsers
