My 100 year-old father recently changed contracts from Sky to Virgin. Unsurprisingly, he spends much of his time indoors and watching TV is his lifeline for entertainment and particularly for sport. Again, predictably, his eyesight is poor and seeing and selecting the correct button on the new remote is proving virtually impossible for him. The remote is small, sleek and attractive but, for him and presumably many like him virtually useless. The main culprit is the directional arrows, they are neither proud nor coloured so he ends up pressing OK instead. Virgin supply no user-friendly alternative. They suggest he uses the microphone function. To do that he needs to know the channel number. To get to that he needs to go to the Guide - another tiny unlabelled button - hopeless! Our only option seems to be to find a universal age friendly remote and to programme it to work both the Virgin box and his TV. We accept that design and appearance of tech is important but we feel that users who rely on TV for companionship, information and entertainment are being deliberately sidelined. If any other users have solved a similar problem we'd be interested to learn how.
