Shopping centre charity helps elderly and disabled people overcome internet challenges
A Sussex shopping centre based charity has joined a national campaign to help elderly and disabled people overcome the challenges of using the internet.
The Guildbourne IT Workshop, based in Worthing’s Guildbourne Shopping Centre, has become a partner of Go ON Gold, a project designed to help elderly and disabled adults make full use of the internet by offering one-to-one advice and training.
Go ON Gold now hopes other shopping centres will follow its lead by joining the campaign to capitalise on the new awareness and understanding of equality issues generated by the success of the Paralympics.
Go ON Gold co-founder and chair of the RNIB Group, Kevin Carey, said: “More than half of the eight million UK citizens who have never used the internet are disabled. At a time when digital access plays an ever-increasing role in almost every aspect of our lives, these statistics are shocking and unacceptable.
Never Miss a Retail Update!“Our campaign highlights the help which is available, encourages others to help point non-users in the right direction and shows businesses and organisations how much society as a whole can gain by sharing such knowledge.”
Guildbourne IT Workshop manager Andy Sheppard added: “As a charity dedicated to providing free one to one help, advice and training on computers and the internet to the elderly, disabled and adults with learning difficulties it makes perfect sense for us to spread the message about other ways of increasing accessibility to all parts of modern life.
“As we are in a prominent location we are able to reach people who may otherwise not know about the services we offer or who may have felt using computer was not for them.”
The Go ON Gold website acts as focus for key resources and expertise to help people get online and also features a number of videos by high profile disabled people such as leading Paralympian peer and disability rights campaigner, Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson.
Supported by Go ON UK, a new partnership chaired by UK digital champion, Martha Lane-Fox, Go ON Gold is also backed by the BBC, Age UK, the Post Office, TalkTalk, Lloyds, the Big Lottery Fund and Eon.
