By Mencap
Hi, I’m Emily and I’m the Digital Champion at Mencap Liverpool and Sefton. I was recruited in May 2023 to help deliver the Ofcom media literacy project in partnership with Royal Mencap Society. Having a
learning disability
A learning disability is to do with the way someone's brain works. It makes it harder for someone to learn, understand or do things.
myself has helped me to connect so well with our audience and design and deliver some fantastic content for this project which I will tell you more about now.
The online world is growing really fast, and it is becoming a bigger and bigger part of everyone’s everyday life. With each new way we learn to use the internet, we learn more about how it can help us and make life easier.
For a long time, people with a learning disability had no access, limited access or supervised access to the online world. Now, with smart phones, tablets and unlimited mobile data, the internet has never been easier to access. Rather than ban, monitor or restrict people with a learning disability, we want to help people gain the skills and confidence to use the internet safely – the same as anyone else.
That’s why it was so good to be part of the Ofcom ‘Making Sense of Media’ project, designed to help people with a learning disability be safe online. There are scams, tricks and traps for people to fall for online. Everyone is vulnerable to this though, not just people with a learning disability.
We created content in a series of videos to explain how to stay safe by being more aware of what is online. We came up with a theme for our project to help people understand, which was ‘Pause, Think, Click’.
Our project helps people with a learning disability understand more about being safe online. For example, stopping to think about the links you might see in an email - could they be a scam?
Some of our Mencap members got involved in the project by
giving up their time to be interviewed and explain how they felt using the internet.
A group watching one of the new 'Pause, Think, Click' videos
We held
focus groups
Where a group of people meet to talk about a topic, and a researcher asks them some questions.
with members of Mencap Liverpool and Sefton and asked members what social media they use, how people get on the internet, and what sort of things people use the internet for.
We then spoke about what people worried about when going online and asked them what they would like to know more about. These conversations gave me a starting point of what was needed most by people.
We also got feedback from more than 80 people with a learning disability from all over the country about what was good and what needed improving on. We ran sessions where people watched the videos and gave feedback helping us make them even better.
Taking part in the Ofcom Making Sense of Media project for me has been eye opening. I have learned so much from creating different videos for scamming, catfishing, keeping personal information safe and cyberbullying. I now know more about what each one is and feel more confident in helping people understand what they all mean as well.
The feedback we received has been really positive. People have said they’ve learned how to do different things and how to be safe while doing them. After watching the videos, people are already asking us for more around other things that they have experienced or need help with.
The internet, social media and the online world is not going away, it will continue to become a bigger part of everyone’s lives, and we will continue to work hard to make sure that people with learning disability are a part of that world too. We just need to make sure that people remember to ‘Pause, Think, Click’.