A new study suggests the "digital divide" goes much deeper than a question of who has computer equipment and who can access the Internet, the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News reports. The divide goes down into the level of what content is available online.

The yearlong study -- carried out by the Children's Partnership -- examined 1,000 Web sites and interviewed low-income users, community leaders and literacy experts to find out what sorts of existing Internet content would be useful for underprivileged people and/or those with weak reading skills, the Mercury News reports.

In its report, the Children's Partnership claims that only six percent of the sites examined had information useful to low-income users. Only one percent included information on jobs and housing.

"A lot of this has to do with the lack of local, practical content," Wendy Lazarus, co-director of the Children's Partnership, told the Mercury News. "They really want to know what's in their neighborhood, where can they take a GED and get low-cost housing."

When examining sites for their accessibility by people with low literacy skills, the organization found only one percent included content that could be easily read by this segment, estimated as 44 million Americans. Only two percent of the sites targeted non-English speakers, the Mercury News reports.

One effort cited by the report as offering content that could address these problems is LiteracyNet, run by CNN and the Western/Pacific Literacy Network. The free site uses news stories to help people learn how to read, the Mercury News reports.

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