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0 pointsreaperducer14d ago0 comments

Old people. They exist.

It's not about age. It's about ability.

A lot of the people I build web pages for are poorly educated. The text we use for web is written for people with an eighth-grade education. Print material is fifth-grade.

People in the SV bubble can't imagine that there are tens of millions of people in America who cannot understand how an SPA works.

These people are invisible, even as they ladle out the food in the Google cafeteria, and polish the chrome in the Meta lobby.

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antasvara14d ago

I'm going to link my favorite survey [0] to illustrate this point. Its called the PIAAC, and it's a internationally standardized assessment of adult skills in literacy, numeracy, and problem solving.

28% of the US is at Level 1 or below. That level roughly corresponds to reading a simple text and being able to answer a question about it that requires limited inference (i.e. if the question is "what color are pigs," the answer would be in the text as "pigs are pink in color.")

[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp

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