The accessibility dividend
For too many years, too many people regarded making technology accessible as a burden. For that matter, even requests for simple courtesies like ramps on kerbs and braille markings on lift buttons caused raised eyebrows. Now though, things pioneered as assistive technologies are becoming mainstream must haves.
Most people reading this article will have tried out sone form of touch screen by now, probably a phone, a tablet, or a satnav in the car. We now expect to be able to use computers with just one or two fingers. Something that was once seen as marginal technology for people who couldn't use a keyboard or a mouse is now a must-have on consumer devices. It also means that web-designers are finding out first hand what its like trying to use a tiny screen when the text is too small to read for anyone past puberty. Suddenly "accessibility" has become an issue which affects everyone.
Sometimes, even one-finger touch control is too demanding. For years, accessibility researchers have experimented with eyeball tracking as a way of letting paralysed patients communicate with the world. Most people don't realise how sophisticated and refined this technology has become, helped by cheap computer power and cheap digital cameras.
One spin-off of eye tracking which you may have encountered is in consumer research. Nowadays, when people are asked to preview adverts and give their opinions, not only do the researchers record the verbal answers, but they also track the eye movements of the subjects to work out which precise areas of the advert they were really looking at.
Eye tracking technology is now getting close to mainstream. Tobi, a European research company, has announced that it will be making a limited production run of 5,000 units of an eyeball tracking device which connects to a spare USB port, clips to the bottom edge of your screen, and lets you use it to control the mouse pointer. Its probably still not ready to be a consumer product, but it should let developers get their hands on the kit at affordable prices and work out how to integrate it into programs. Meanwhile, Lenovo is said to be working on similar technology which it plans to build into a forthcoming laptop as a standard feature.
So what is today's cutting edge in accessibility? Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have released this video which shows Jan Scheuermann, a 53 year old paraplegic woman, using a thought-controlled robot arm to feed herself chocolate. We are many years away from being able to deploy this sort of technology outside the lab, but it shows the fantastic potential of the man-machine interface.
25th January 2013
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.