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Accessibility

CS 349 - User interfaces, LEC 001

7-13-2016

Elvin Yung

Slides

  • Curb cuts: make it easy for people people on wheelchairs to get through a curb

  • We make accommodations for people with different abilities in real life.

  • It should also be done in software.

  • Accessibility isn't just about being on a wheelchair or being blind. We should to accommodate

  • We want to design for the "average" person, but there's no average person.

  • Every time you design something, you're at risk of alienating certain groups of people from your product.

  • We all have temporary or situational disabilities.

    • Obvious: ones being sick, being injured, etc.
    • Driving: limited attentional bandwidth
    • Underwater diving: impaired sight, hearing, mobility, etc.
    • Using an ATM in the middle of the night in Kitchener
    • Walking down the street and texting

Walking + Pointing Performance

  • Experiment to measure performance on a tapping task on a phone in different situations

  • Situations include: sitting, treadmill (different speeds), obstacle course

  • Result: performance seated and walking are fairly similar, but in an obstacle course, the task took more time and had a higher error rate.

  • Obvious in hindsight - obstacle course is the only thing that needs attention outside the phone

  • Takeaway: it's better if you can focus on a single task.

  • This is why texting and driving is bad!

  • Another experiment: reading comprehension

  • When walking, people were slower to read, and had higher error rates.

  • When you're walking, you're most concerned about the attention split,

Designing for Walking

  • Sitting UI: small menu items, small buttons
  • Standing UI: make everything bigger, reduces cognitive load
  • This is also one of the reasons why mobile UIs are better: on the go, you're going to get a better experience if you have less cognitive load.

Aging

  • Natural effects of aging:

    • Worse coordination
    • Visual coordination - coordination starts to fade by the 40s, and start to need reading glasses by the 50s
    • Hearing impairments
    • Memory loss

  • Baby boomers: huge spike of birth rate after WWII

  • They're all getting old now! If you were born in 1951 you are now 65, i.e. retiring.

  • As a designer, it might be an opportunity to build usable interfaces for this demographic.

Video: MIT AGNES - a suit for designers to understand the usability challenges with aging

  • We should design technologies to be inclusive. They often end up helping everyone!

Statistics on Impairments

TODO: Copy from slides

OS Support

  • Any recent version of Windows, OSX, etc. have a range of tools for accessibility issues.
  • This is awesome.
  • There are all kinds of things to manage motor/visual/audial issues.
  • It's a decent solution, but not perfect. Users end up having to memorize lots of keyboard shortcuts, be a good touch typer, etc.

Colorblindness

  • Not being able to distinguish two colors
  • Color-coded UIs are often bad for this

Motor Impairments

  • Sticky keys
  • Filter keys
  • Repeat rate

Various tools to help with motor impairments

  • Integramouse - straw-like mouse for people with no arm movement

  • Voice dictation/transcription

  • Human-brain interface stuff

    • Would be awesome... if it worked!

  • Angle Mouse

Cognitive Impairments

  • Phosphor - highlight changes in the UI, for people who have trouble keeping track of where they were in the UI

The "Curb Cut" Phenomenon

  • A accessibility-minded design that ends up helping everyone

  • Example: cassette tapes, developed as an alternate to reel-to-reel tapes for visually impaired people

  • Another example: closed captioning, originally intended for which ended up being used to many more purposes

Reasons to Design for Accessibility

  • You're legally motivated to make your software accessible.

  • If you plan on selling software to a US government body, it needs to make accessibility accommodations.

  • Class action lawsuit against Target

  • Web accessibility is essential for equal opportunity.