It may seem like an overstatement, but if you’ve never used a computer before pressing the “on” switch for the first time can be a cripplingly intimidating experience. We recently started working with a couple, Mrs & Mrs H, who had just acquired a laptop for the first time, and wanted some “hand-holding” to get them started. They didn’t want to call on friends & family as Mrs H has a variety of challenges, which makes learning new skills harder for her. Plus, they’d rather spend their time with friends & family relaxing and enjoying themselves, which at the moment doesn’t describe their relationship with computers.

The challenges? Mrs H had an accident a few years ago which left her with very serious life-threatening injuries at the time. She has largely recovered, but was left with short term memory loss – which makes learning new skills harder – and severely impaired vision. At the same time, she is an intelligent woman who gets frustrated at her relatively new restrictions and is acutely aware of the enforced slower pace she is having to take. Over the time I worked with her, I was impressed with and humbled by her quiet and calm attitude of just getting on with life. The main reason for getting a PC was to give Mrs H another independent activity, as she isn’t able to go out alone and one can only watch so much daytime TV without going nuts.

So, Mr & Mrs H Had been to PC World to buy a new computer, and had broadband installed. PC World sent them home with a password-protected Windows 7 PC, on the default theme which at start-up showed light grey icons on a white background. The screen resolution was set to fit-as-much-on-the-screen-as-possible, so the script was super-tiny. Mrs H has a magnifying glass which she keeps handy, but even with that she was struggling.

The first thing I did was change the theme to one of the “High Contrast” themes that is shipped with Windows 7 (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Turn-on-High-Contrast), and change the mouse pointer to the biggest, blackest one I could find. I also changed the general text size to be “large” (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Make-the-text-on-your-screen-larger-or-smaller) and set the default text size in Mrs H’s browser to be as big as she needed it to be.

It’s possible they didn’t ask, but it seems to me that these are things that could easily have been done by PC World when the computer was being prepared for sale. They took the trouble to set passwords for 3 accounts which, by the time Mr & Mrs H came to use the PC a couple of weeks after purchase, they had forgotten. Or rather, they had forgotten the numbers attached to the passwords which were needed because their memorable words weren’t long enough.

In terms of learning, repetition is important to Mrs H. In our first session (after we’d got the PC looking reasonable for her) we went through switching the PC on, selecting her profile and setting up to surf the Internet. She then practiced this under guidance a few times.

Usually, for techie tutor sessions, we fill out a sheet which details what the aims are for the session, and as the session progresses, detailed notes are made by the tutor, and a copy left with the customer for their reference. Handwritten notes weren’t clear enough for Mrs H, so after the session I typed up the notes and mailed them to her.

Subsequent sessions included reviewing what we had done the previous week, setting up and accessing email, and (and I enjoyed this one!) accessing and playing computer games such as Solitaire. I also left her with pointers to some online exercises to help her get used to using the mouse and how to fill in forms or register on websites. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/computertutor/computertutorone/index.shtml )

It may seem like overkill to get private tuition for these things, but Mrs H would have been nervous about going to a public class, which in any case, would probably have been too fast-paced. Not from an intelligence point of view – she’s clearly very bright – but from a confidence and retention point of view. She knew that she could take things at her own pace, that I was there for as long as she needed me to be, and that I wouldn’t rush her.

We didn’t cover a lot of material with Mrs H. However, what we have done is given her the basic tools and confidence to use the computer to surf the internet, and hopefully given her a whole new window on the world. After week 1 she was looking up background info on her favourite soaps, and I’m hoping one day to be challenging her on Bejewelled Blitz.