Flyover Country

Aaron - I've been thinking about blogging for a while, I've even gone as far as creating a Wordpress blog. However, and rather appropriately for a blog on UI design, I don't like the usability of most blogging platforms. I'm one of those people who don't have a strong compulsion to go and put my thoughts out into the world, with the exception of academic conferences, as I tend to get a free trip out of these *grin*. Following J.S. Adam's Equity Theory of motivation, the costs involved with blogging, such as time and energy, would have to be pretty low in order to motivate me enough to blog, either that or I would have to find some new benefit in blogging. Having said that, I'm open to suggestions on easy to use blogging platforms.

I'm pretty sure most of what I'm saying at the moment will come out soon any way. Ubiquitous computing, or Ubicomp for short, is a growing field and one that is set to mushroom in the future if the future visionaries have it right. At the moment accessibility is seen as designing UI's for people who have some defect in their sensory or motor systems that affect communication. However, in the real world elements of our sensory and motor systems are typically tasked with other activities and are therefore temporarily unavailable to communicate with a computer. Therefore, Ubicomp is going to mainstream accessibility techniques just in order to make the software available in a greater range of scenarios for typical users. Designing Ubicomp platforms that use typical communication channels that are found in desktop UI's will render those UI's unusable in a wide range of scenarios away from the desktop. This is a problem that can be found today in software such as Windows Mobile, where the UI really limits it to an electronic replacement for pen and paper or a portable media player, and Windows MCE.

Will - When are you going to start a blog on this stuff (or perhaps write a book)? I think you could do quite a bit to improve people's understanding of building accessible software. :smile:

aaron

A good way to think of accessibility is as communication through another medium. The typical user will communicate with the computer through key presses and mouse movements and in return the computer will communicate with the user through visual images and auditory sounds. Problems with accessibility occur when a user is unable to either transmit or receive information through the typical communication channels used with a computer. Accessibility really isn't about making software work with assistive technologies, they just provide a means to the end. If viewed as a problem with the typical communication channels making something accessible becomes the need to communicate through alternative media such as sound, haptics, etc.

This view of accessibility as a problem with communications is actually quite beneficial to the design of UI's for users who have no accessibility requirements. Thinking about what semantic concepts are being communicated and how they are being transmitted to the user can reduce ambiguity and the cognitive workload involved with disambiguation, reduce the learning curve, and improve efficiency, ultimately leading to a more usable UI. Taking a communications view also has benefits for the future. Computing devices have started to move away from the desktop and into the big harsh real world. Visual output isn't always appropriate in the real world as the sense of vision can be task with other activities, such as sensing dangers in the environment in order to keep us safe, our hands may not always be free to type, and other senses may be involved in other tasks. Therefore, in order to design UI's that meet the demands of the environmental context in which they will be used it is very likely that communication will have to be made through different media to those typically used with desktop software.

LoL, the screen reader may help. A little. :: grins ::

An excellent suggestion, Aaron. I agree that it really is the best way to understand the experience. Although I do suggest using a screenreader when you do this ;-)

I've found that a great way to test your application for how accessible it is to a blind user is to shut your monitor off, then try to use your application. You'll quickly figure out what things are entirely inaccessible.