Literacy and language

For many people, literacy and language will present additional barriers to engaging in the digital world. Literacy and language skills are required before a person will be able to begin developing their digital skills and confidence. In this section, we explore some of these additional barriers.

Illustration credit: Tessa Mackenzie

Literacy

Basic literacy is an essential part of navigating your online experience. Poor literacy skills can make it incredibly difficult for people to develop their digital skills and confidence. Literacy underpins many online tasks, such as entering a website address, doing an online search, creating and using a password or entering an email address (which is the key to access most services). Some accessibility features can be helpful for people with low literacy skills e.g. speech-to-text and screen readers.

Digital literacy

Digital literacy is how people find, evaluate, share and create information online. Having poor digital literacy skills can make the internet a difficult or impossible environment to navigate, and increase someone’s likelihood of negative experiences like scams. Improving digital literacy through developing skills and confidence with the support of trusted people is essential in ensuring healthy and safe online behaviours. People might have poor digital literacy as a result of inexperience, physical or cognitive challenges, complexity or fear of technology or through a lack of education.

Health Literacy

Health literacy refers to people’s ability to obtain, read, understand and use information about health to make decisions. The way that people access healthcare information can be impacted by their use of technology – including searching online for the causes of symptoms. Using technology to positively impact health and care management requires improving health literacy and helping people to understand appropriate information.

English as a second language

English as a second language presents barriers to people who require support to access health and care systems. Digital inclusion can often go hand-in-hand with supporting the development of other skills, and people accessing services should be supported to overcome language barriers as well. Many local authorities offer support for English as a second language. The Scottish Refugee Council has a database of providers.