Abstract
Today’s software systems and especially graphical user interfaces are mostly designed to fit to the needs of an ideal target audience – most often purely focusing on young, physically and mentally healthy persons. Not even the development of tailored (e.g. to elderly people) user interfaces but also the testing is a challenging task, because a large set of test persons suffering from specific impairments needs to be recruited which in practice often is unfeasible and the reason for statistically insignificant results. But software systems and their graphical user interfaces have to be designed to cope with the special needs of also handicapped persons. In this paper we introduce a method to support the target oriented design process and evaluation of such graphical user interfaces by simulating specific disabilities and typical impairments. Therefore we emulate the influences of such impairments on the performance while using any graphical user interfaces by applying specific filter algorithms on the target interface. This enables evaluations of the GUI under realistic conditions without being forced to actually involve real impaired participants.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Nehmer, J., Becker, M., Karshmer, A., Lamm, R.: Living assistance systems: an ambient intelligence approach. In: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2006, Shanghai, China, May 20-28, pp. 43–50. ACM, New York (2006)
Adam, S., Mukasa, K.S., Breiner, K., Trapp, M.: An apartment-based metaphor for intuitive interaction with ambient assisted living applications. In: Proceedings of the 22nd British HCI Group Annual Conference on HCI 2008, pp. 67–75. British Computer Society, Swinton (2008)
MIT Age Lab, Age Suit Agnes, http://www.agelab.mit.edu/agnes-age-gain-now-empathy-system (last accessed January 10, 2011)
Microsoft Innovation Labs, Digital Lens, http://www.ilabs.microsoft.com/Project/Pages/Project.aspx?ProjectId=5 (last accessed January 10, 2011)
University of Illinois at Urbana, Visual Impairment Simulator, http://www.vis.cita.uiuc.edu/index.php (last accessed January 10, 2011)
IBM Research Tokyo, aDesigner, http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/adesigner (last accessed January 10, 2011)
Oikonomou, T., Votis, K., Korn, P.: A Standalone Vision Impairments Simulator for Java Swing Applications. In: HCI and Usability for e-Inclusion. Springer, Berlin (2009)
Fujitsu: Color Doctor, http://www.fujitsu.com/global/accessibility/assistance/cd/ (last accessed January 10, 2011)
Langdon, P., Clarkson, J., Robinson, P.: A Case Study of Simulating HCI for Special Needs. In: Designing Inclusive Futures. Springer, London (2008)
Sebillo, M., Vitiello, G., Schaefer, G.: Perception Model for People with Visual Impairments. In: Sebillo, M., Vitiello, G., Schaefer, G. (eds.) VISUAL 2008. LNCS, vol. 5188, pp. 279–290. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Montgomery, G.: Breaking the Code of Color: Color Blindness: More Prevalent Among Males. A Report from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2011), http://www.hhmi.org/senses/b130.html (last accessed January 17, 2011)
Windows Media Encoder API, http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Encoder4_Overview.aspx (last accessed January 24, 2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Breiner, K., Wüchner, T., Brunnlieb, M. (2011). The Disability-Simulator: Simulating the Influences of Disabilities on the Usability of Graphical User Interfaces. In: Robertson, M.M. (eds) Ergonomics and Health Aspects of Work with Computers. EHAWC 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6779. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21716-6_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21716-6_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21715-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21716-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)