Summary
Digital inclusion is about ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to connect, participate, and benefit from the digital world in their everyday lives. While older Australians are increasingly digitally engaged, many still face significant challenges, often amplified by disability. Reliable measures of digital inclusion help us understand these patterns and find effective solutions.
The data reported in this briefing shows that:
- digital inclusion falls significantly and steadily from mid-adulthood to the oldest age groups, for both those with and those without a disability;
- disability adds substantially to the risk of digital exclusion right across the ageing population but more so in some age groups than others; and
- the additional exclusion associated with disability is mostly driven by differences in Ability, and to a lesser extent Access.
Background
The Australian Digital Inclusion Index (ADII) uses large-scale survey data to track digital inclusion across Australia. By highlighting barriers like limited network access, high costs of devices or data, and gaps in digital skills, it provides insights that inform strategies to increase inclusion across diverse social groups.
The ADII is managed by a collaboration between the Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society at RMIT, the Centre for Social Impact Swinburne University of Technology, and Telstra.
In mid-2025, COTA Victoria requested additional data from the ADII to learn more about the combined impact of ageing and disability on digital inclusion. The findings below are based on this data, drawn from the 2023 survey. We thank the ADII team for making the data available.