Hacker News Reader

Comment by degenerate | Hacker News Reader

You can take a picture, convert it to PDF, and fax it... all on your phone. Some apps offer this for $$$, but it's possible to get it all done for free using websites (take pic -> convert to pdf online -> fax with faxzero.com). Some paid apps even mimic a scanned copy by having you take multiple shots and reconstructing what the paper looks like into PDF automatically.

The government will always be slower to respond to change, so it's sad to hear a story like this. However the author had an excellent opportunity to educate its readers, but instead focused on the fear factor ("...he had to go to a Staples store in the middle of a pandemic...") - no, he didn't have to do that. Pretending the only way to send a fax involves finding a fax machine is disingenuous.

View on HN

To be fair, the majority of people can barely resize an image, let alone take a good quality clear photo, convert it to pdf, and then have the knowledge of online fax being possible.

With respect to all the elders for whom all of this computer technology stuff came up pretty late in their lifetime - when and where do we draw the line about basic computer competency?

I doubt there any estimates on the number of people who can fax a PDF from a phone. But I'd be surprised if it was much higher than 25%.

Most people here could probably work it out eventually, but most people are not the general population.

81% of people own a smart phone, so that's not a good start.

maybe someone will come along and explain why this is insensitive, but I think if a person has access to a computer (which is not a given) and a naive search query returns (relatively short/simple) step-by-step instructions on the first page of results, it's not unreasonable to expect the person to be able to do that thing.

Have you seen people doing basic internet searches? Open "the internet" by clicking the 'e' button, search Bing for Google, go to Google, type in the web address of an email someone sent you that you printed out ... I'm not even kidding.

But yes, most people can send an image on Facebook (with some coaching), so they can learn to send an image to a fax service.

What often confused these things is that people will type "send a fax" on Google, and then install the first thing recommended - those recommendations are based on 'making most profit for $company & Google' and so are often not the best system and often charge a lot c for basic services (with all the usual dark patterns).

yes, I often have to watch my father do these things. sometimes I can't handle the frustration and give step-by-step instructions, but I try to act like a TA and have him come up with the next step. usually he can figure it out himself if given enough time, he just doesn't really believe he can.

The internet is full of criminals. It's a reasonable way to expect people to find tools to access government services.

where do we draw the line about basic computer competency?

I think the question is why should there be a line about basic computer competency?

Why can't many methods be available to people, instead of restricting ourselves to certain methods?

Not everyone went to college. Heck, not everyone goes to high school. Those are very often the people who need government and medical services the most.

When computing interfaces stop being, generally, awful and arcane and requiring learning all kinds of voodoo rituals and tea-leaf reading to use (which becomes knowledge of how the systems are put together if you go into programming, of course—"oh that button's probably disappearing then re-appearing when you click it because [implementation detail]")

I'm a pretty cynical guy but in this case I disagree, the vast majority of UIs are simple enough that you just don't notice them working. Having tried occasionally to bake a UI myself, We take good UI for granted.

Yeah there's a learning curve but by and large even across operating system there are consistencies and even technically illiterate users can get up to speed quickly.

Everyone on this board lives in a tech bubble.

Do you remember the first time you discovered you could swipe in from the right in windows, or down from the top in android to access hidden functionality? Or the magic swipe to go back in the browser? Have you tried accessing the internet from small rural town USA? If you leave the coasts there are places you can't get cell service, much less blazing fast cell based internet from a rural provider. Those coverage maps the providers show in their advertisements are huge lies. Modern web UI's don't tend to run great on HugesNet, or single bar 3G.

That is just the tip, UI's have majorly regressed from the time period of the original iphone. Go to the local senior citizens home and give a bunch of them modern android/iphones and see how many can figure out how to add a contact, or send an email. Worse companies like consumer cellular have a section for flip phones. Not that it is really bad. My mother has one and likes it more than any smart phone, but its limits her.

Before you criticise computers or the internet as an access path to government, remember that bar it needs to beat is the DMV/MVA office, which is uniformly awful across this country.

This is a good point. We take a lot of skills for granted that required to successfully use a DMV/MVA office. If the truly compare the processes, which is actually worse?

We will probably have a better idea of where that line might be when the number of Americans who don't use the internet isn't measured in the millions. That number is about 25 million adults now.

https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/FT_19...

I would bet cash money that a substantial fraction of people who claim they "don't use the Internet" actually do but don't know they are using "the Internet".

Also, many of the people who don't use the internet also don't have access to fax machines or mailbox service either (homeless, very rural), so they aren't harmed by internet replacement for those.

I’m not sure about that. The 65+ demographic is huge and very over represented in the survey.

From the full pew survey, the strongest correlations were education and age... and only 19% of those who didn’t have the internet said it was because they couldn’t afford it.

Given that the demographics of people who don’t have the internet overlap very significantly with those who need benefits the most, I can’t help but think that moving public services to online-only might be a bit of an out-of-touch solution.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/22/some-americ...

your concern about accessibility is valid, but this strikes me as an exaggeration. my seventy year old father never progressed past "hunt-and-peck" and continues to try to poke my laptop display as if it were an ipad, but he can damn sure figure out how to scan an important document to pdf. if you even enter a clueless search query like "how do I send fax", most of the top hits are about sending faxes with a computer.

my seventy old father

So your anecdada cancels out his anecdata?

I work in healthcare, occasionally customer-facing. Your dad is the exception.

Touch typing is not an essential tech skill.

Your laptop missing modern features isn't a problem with your father's skills.

That goes to OPs point. Rather than writing a narrative based on fear, there’s another version of the story that is: Here’s how to scan to PDF from your Android/iOS/Windows laptop. Here’s a YouTube video you can follow along with. Here’s 8 freeware applications that will help you crop it. These 5 services will allow you to fax without having to go to Staples.

There are still people who that won’t help, but positive mental attitude goes a long way.

This seems missing the point of what percentage of the US population is lacking the basic digital literacy to be able to remotely approach some of the tasks above.

Being a consumer is far different than being a creator/manipulator of content.

We do it natively in our day so much we forget that there are many that don't participate in the world like this. They probably would, if they had the chance to learn.

Which baffles me even on things like craigslist. How the hell can people not provide pictures? In 2008? Sure I can understand not everybody had a portable camera because why? But 2020? Absolutely not. It's frankly unacceptable that anybody uses that excuse anymore. I always laugh when I see aparatments for rent...but no photos. There is no way I'd want to have a landlord who can't take like 3 photos to even advertise their product. They'll probably even require me to send them an f'ing paper check too.

<i> They'll probably even require me to send them an f'ing paper check too. </i>

I've been temporary renting my old house, and I don't take credit cards, nor am I setting up a custom merchant/billing/etc system for one renter. Mostly because all the easy solutions eat a percentage of the transaction.

So, outside of the initial cashiers check for the security/etc depost, I've been willing to take direct depost, or any other electronic form of payment that can deposit money into a checking account I've setup.

Funny thing is, all of my renters so far have ended up sending paper checks. Including the first one who also happened to be a pretty serious software engineer. That is despite the fact that there are a dozen billpay/etc services and various electronic transfer/etc services in existence. Overwhelmingly they are ripoffs, and the few run by honest banks in a number of cases actually send paper checks if the bill isn't for a major credit card company.

Try it. Can your bank send a thousand dollar plus amount to a random 3rd party bank/account for free (or a trivial fee?). I doubt it. For whatever reason setting up a funds transfer between two arbitrary checking accounts is more difficult than it should be.

You can take a picture, convert it to PDF, and fax it... all on your phone.

For work a couple of weeks ago I looked up the Census figures for connectivity in the areas that my company serves.

15% of the population don't have ANY internet devices. Not at home, at work, on a computer, a tablet, or even on a phone of any type.

It was something like 25% of the people in our service area don't have an internet connection at home. Not cable, DSL, fixed microwave, or even cellular.

Based on that, I suspect a lot of poor people only get to use the internet at work. The web logs for the sites I maintain seem to confirm this. When the libraries and businesses closed, thousands of users simply disappeared.

Honestly I would not have thought to look for a phone app that does faxes and hell, twenty years ago I ran a system auto-sending faxes and tried to build a start up on it.

Yeah Inthink going to Staples was reasonable.

Hmm I guess 15 years ago eFax was actually a thing because it saved people from having to buy fax machines, and you didn't need to be home to receive/send them. I feel like most people around me who used faxes in any capacity knew about it.

"Convert to PDF online' is rife with privacy and confidentiality issues, especially regarding this kind of information.

I have used such sites to convert say, a PDF data table to an Excel file. I would never use it for anything involving business or personal information.

Once you involve random services, you’d be as well served just emailing the pictures.

Why would you trust a free PDF conversion or fax service.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com