Bulletproof Tool For Golden Age Browsing?

An anonymous reader writes "I work in a retirement/assisted living home. Many of the residents had never used the Internet but really find it fascinating once they are given a little training. However, I've stopped introducing it to them because of the drain it puts on me. There are a million and one things that a computer novice can screw up, and I don't have time to solve all of them. These folks don't need any sophistication. and they need only the most basic options. Adjustable text size would be nice, but otherwise — no email, no word processing or editing, no printing — just Internet browsing. This may not seem like a big market, but it's getting bigger every day! Is there an absolutely fool-proof device that can provide this without requiring virus scanners and constant attention?"

Comments

Wii

[Techno-Hat]

It's called a Nintendo Wii. Turn it on, browse awhile, zoom in, zoom out and turn it off.

Opera on Linux

[Dlugar]

Try Opera on Linux. You get full resizing (of both text and images) with single buttons (plus and minus, no modifiers needed). With Linux you can put work into locking down everything else, so e.g. you can only have a single, full-screen version of Opera running.

Dlugar

Re:Opera on Linux

[Echnin]

I'll second this. The zoom feature of Opera is one of the few ingenious Opera features that haven't been copied by other browsers yet. Everything is increased in size smoothly, even Flash elements. Just get some reasonably high-resolution monitors for the machines (1600 horizontal), and run at 200% default zoom, then you can have blind people browsing the web. Another poster mentioned that only the content is zoomed, and not the application itself, but you will probably want to hide or disable most of the application interface (menu bar, tabs) using kiosk mode http://www.opera.com/support/mastering/kiosk/ anyway. You can set the images in the address bar to large size, and then the only remaining issue (which I admit may be somewhat significant) is the size of the address field, which is still small. It is possible this can be configured using themes, but I don't know.

Re:VMWare to the rescue!

[CAR912]

Thank heavens for Leet Key, just select, right-click, and select leetkey->text transformers->base64 decode... several times.

Install the Wikipedia search plugin too

[Von Rex]

Sometimes I help the elderly learn about computers. One thing that never fails to amaze them is Wikipedia.

Sifting the signal from the noise in a typical google search is just too complex for people that are computer novices as well as internet novices. But show them the Wikipedia plugin, where they can just search on whatever they're curious about and immediately get a single response that probably answers their question, and they'll immediately grasp just how cool the internet can be and they'll want to learn more.

I usually set windows to large or extra-large fonts, too. Just ask them which setting they find most comfortable while they are in front of the computer.

Re:LiveCD DSL linux or Mac OSX Simple Finder

[sniggly]

Same here, my mother is using debian, firefox, google mail and openoffice allows her MS compatible document exchange for her charity work; the box is behind a firewall and the setup works flawlessly. People who claim linux isn't ready for this kind of setup are clueless, it is windows which cannot function properly in this setup; my mothers friends all operate spyware and virus infested zombie spam mail systems and I am glad I don't know enough about windows to help them out. Windows + office also costs a bundle.