Barriers to entry

I had the opportunity today to participate in an online conversation hosted by one of my pastors. It was... educational. There were technology problems, for one thing; on my end, figuring out the software was more difficult than it should have been, and at one point the pastor's line went dead (not the best of circumstances, considering that he was the one hosting the discussion).

On a personal level, I'm not a phone person. At all. In general, I'm a much more eloquent writer than speaker. Actually, Moses' plea that he is slow of speech has always resonated with me; as a child, I actually had to go to speech therapy because (a) I couldn't say the letter "r," and (b) I tend to pause a lot and fill in gaps with multiple "umms" and "uhs." This has, of course, impacted my life in a number of ways, but that's a different blog post. For now, suffice it to say that any technology that requires speech is less than pleasant. I am in no way cognitively impaired, and chances are nobody realizes I had a speech impediment, but using a technology dependent on orality is still a barrier to entry to me.

Chances are, I'm in the minority on that one. Still, it's an interesting thought. As my pastor tries to build a collaborative site, he has to consider what people use. One of my favorite stories from Tapscott's Wikinomics is of the CEO of GeekSquad's attempt to build a wiki. Despite the tech-geek nature of GeekSquad members, the wiki never really took off. It turned out that members were already collaborating elsewhere--in a MMO, in fact.

So, of course, the question for my pastor is, what technologies are users of his new site already using to collaborate? It may be, in his case, that I'm the minority in hating phones; it might be the best option for him. Still, it's interesting to ponder from an accessibility standpoint. Is universality an impossibility?