Advance Program - Tutorial

22. Enabling Technology for Users with Special Needs

Monday, 08:30 - 17:00

Instructors
Alistair Edwards, University of York, UK
Elizabeth Mynatt, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Benefits
You will learn how the fields of HCI and assistive technology can work together to design technology to enable all users.

Origins
Earlier tutorial at INTERCHI 93, CHI 94 and CHI 95.

Features

• Discuss how we are all disabled and how interfaces should be designed for all users.
• Survey five major types of impairments (mobility, vision, speech, hearing, and cognitive) and technology that addresses these impairments
• Discuss US and European legislation
• Focus on technology for elderly individuals
• Obtain design guidelines
• Solve a group design problem

Audience
User interface designers, developers, managers, and researchers. No specific background is needed to benefit from this tutorial.

Presentation
Lecture format augmented with 35mm slides, videotape footage, and live demonstrations of enabling technology. Group design exercises.

Instructors
Alistair Edwards is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York, England. He researches the use of multiple modalities of interaction to make computers accessible to people with disabilities. He is the author of Speech Synthesis: Technology for Disabled People and editor of Extra-Ordinary Human-Computer Interaction. Elizabeth Mynatt is an Assistant Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She developed the Mercator Environment that provides access to GUIs for people who are blind. She worked for three years at Xerox PARC on ubiquitous computing and, most recently, she started the "Aging in Place" project focusing on helping elderly individuals live in their own homes longer.