Résultats de recherche pour « Inclusive Design »

This paper considers appropriate research methodologies for the development of Universal Usability. It is written from the viewpoint of research which has the long term objective of developing technological systems for everyone, including people with disabilities. It considers whether new research paradigms are appropriate and how they are different from those used within traditional technological research. It suggests the development of a new paradigm of “User Sensitive Inclusive Design” which includes people with disabilities within a User Centred Design methodology, and recommends a collaborative approach to the development of such a methodology.

Understanding users’ capabilities, needs and expectations is key to the domain of Inclusive Design. Much of the work in the field could be informed and further strengthened by clear, valid and representative data covering the full range of people's capabilities. This article reviews existing data sets and identifies the challenges inherent in measuring capability in a manner that is informative for work in Inclusive Design. The need for a design-relevant capability data set is identified and consideration is given to a variety of capability construct operationalisation issues including questions associated with self-report and performance measures, sampling and the appropriate granularity of measures. The need for further experimental work is identified and a programme of research designed to culminate in the design of a valid and reliable capability survey is described.

It is known that many products are not accessible to large sections of the population. Designers instinctively design for able-bodied users and are either unaware of the needs of users with different capabilities, or do not know how to accommodate their needs into the design cycle.

Let us say you wish to design and develop a new product or technology. You want to ensure that as many people as possible are able to use it—not only is it politically and in some countries legally correct but with our ageing population it makes good economic sense. You want to follow existing design advice, of which you have been told there is much around. But where is the best place to look, and who do you go to for more specific information? You may decide to look for published materials, such as design guidelines. However, when you find guidelines, you cannot always be sure that they will be applicable to your specific product or technology. If you follow these guidelines, can you be sure that your product will be usable by more people?

In analysing parallels between sustainable and inclusive design, the paper investigates reasons for architects' disappointing uptake of these approaches so far. A common reason seems to be the lack of knowledge that has the applicability required by architectural practice. Researchers produce knowledge on why and how we should accomplish more sustainable practices in building, which rarely filters down to practising architects. Vice versa, the knowledge developed through architects' design experiences rarely feeds back into academic research. Moreover, in the case of inclusive design, the user side represents a valuable body of knowledge as well: through their specific interaction with buildings/spaces, users with disabilities appreciate qualities and detect misfits most architects are unaware of. If the uptake of sustainability and inclusiveness in architecture is to be improved, the major challenge thus seems less a need to generate more knowledge than a need to make more effective use of what is already available.

We interact with dozens of web interfaces on a daily basis, making inclusive web design practices more important than ever. This paper investigates the impacts of web interface design on ambient belonging, or the sense of belonging to a community or culture. Our experiment deployed two content-identical webpages for an introductory computer science course, differing only in aesthetic features such that one was perceived as masculine while the other was gender-neutral. Our results confirm that young women exposed to the masculine page are negatively affected, reporting significantly less ambient belonging, interest in the course and in studying computer science broadly. They also experience significantly more concern about others' perception of their gender relative to young women exposed to the neutral page, while no similar effect is seen in young men. These results suggest that gender biases can be triggered by web design, highlighting the need for inclusive user interface design for the web.