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An Insight into Designing for Disabilities
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With the ever-growing number of baby boomers the disabled user is going to make up more of the population. According to the U.S. Census Bureau the number of Americans age 55 and older will almost double between now and 2030. This is an increase from 60 million today to 107.6 million. Furthermore, the Center for Disease Control states that 19% of people over the age of 70 have visual impairments and 33% of people age 70 and over have some sort of hearing problems. Because of this, it's important that interactive applications are designed for an ever-changing user. Users are constantly changing in age, physical ability and mental ability. However, most applications remain static, not compensating for these changes. For those with learning disabilities, applications could be built with minimal functionality, adding more advanced features over time as the user learns the system. This would allow the user to personalize the application and because there would be fewer functions to learn, the user would also benefit from easier learnability. For the visually impaired, font sizes should be easy to change and information should always be available separate from the presentation to be easily translatable by an audio interpreter or other device.
Lee-Anne Harrison and Peter Robinson stated the following, "Consequently, many design approaches for allowing accessibility by members of either group focus on their disabilities. However, the principal concern for a designer should be physical capabilities, irrespective of cause." In many cases the disabled person learns to use their abilities in ways that the able bodied
person does not. A study done by Professor Franco Lepore, Director of the Centre for Research in Neuropsychology and Cognition at the University Montreal, has discovered that people who are blind are better able to hear and localize sound. Realizing this ability allows designers to create applications that use sound for localization, system status and interaction cues.
Fredrik Winberg from the Center for User-Oriented IT Design of Stockholm Sweden and John Bowers from the School of Music at the University of East Anglia developed a game that was to be played by both the blind and able bodied simultaneously. The game provided a consistent experience to both users and focused on the blind user's ability to hear and localize sounds. The game "Towers of Hanoi" consisted of three poles and a number of donut shaped rings of various sizes that fit through the poles. The goal was for the user to move the rings from the far left pole to the far right pole and always stack the rings from largest to smallest. To do this, a tone was generated for each ring with the larger ring getting the deepest tone. A ring's position within the pole was given by the length of the tone generated. For example, a ring that sat above all other rings at the top of a pole would generate a shorter tone than the ring at the bottom. This allowed the user to sonically compare the sizes and vertical locations of the rings. The user could tell where the poles where positioned by a tone generated from the left, right or both speakers for the center pole. There was no part of the game that did not have an audio trigger associated with it.