What do the cassette recorder, the biro and TV remote controls all have in common? Chances are they weren’t designed for you, but you’d find them hard to live without. The typewriter, curb cuts (those things you walk down at the edge of pavements), captions on CNN, carbon paper, the long-playing record, the vibrating pager? These are all examples of things that were designed to solve a problem for people with some kind of disability but which, because of their design, turned out to be useful for people who didn’t have those disabilities.

Design for people with disabilities is clearly in vogue, with two conferences in the last year on the theme (Include 2001[i] at the RCA’s Helen Hamlyn Research Centre, focusing on inclusive design, and the ACM Conference on Universal Usability[ii]), and a keynote devoted to the subject at CHI2001[iii]. While its popularity is clearly connected to the government’s penchant for ‘social inclusion’, design for disability presents tough challenges for designers which will benefit all the work they do, and gives us some fascinating insights into the unintended consequences of design and technology.

Take the cassette recorder. This was designed as the result of the challenge to create a platform for talking books for the blind at a time when existing technology was cumbersome even for the sighted. It was believed that the compact cassette’s sound quality wasn’t up to snuff for recorded music, but the Walkman – its unintended consequence – put paid to that idea. As Professor Alan Newell of the Department of Applied Computing at University of Dundee, speaking at the Include pointed out: “without blind people we would be dragging reel-to-reels through the Tube”.

Disability is one of those terms whose discussion produces more heat than light, and it is useful to understand it objectively so that we can think about its implications for design. Disabilities fall into three categories, affecting our motion, cognitive or sensory capabilities. Each of these disabilities can have a different character. They may be long-term (beginning at birth or acquired later), short term (produced by an infection or disease), or location- or activity-specific (perhaps related to the workplace or a sport).

As Gregg C Vanderheiden of the University of Wisconsin’s Trace R&D Center commented in his closing plenary[iv] at CHI2001: “people have disabilities when they are unable to accommodate the world around them”. This is not to say that we are all disabled, rather that we don’t always have access to our full capabilities.

There are a number of changes taking place beyond the world of design that may improve the situation of people with disabilities. On the disabled as workers, Bruce Nussbaum of Business Week magazine, a speaker and rapporteur at Include, observed that the shift in the developed world to an information-based economy has raised the value of ‘mind-power’. “Not being able to lift 400lbs will no longer be critical to employers”, he noted, adding that the economic boom in the US had meant that people who had been on the outside (the disabled, long-term unemployed) had been brought in to the labour market.

On the disabled as consumers Nussbaum argued in his report on Include that as corporations are motivated by profit not morality “the most efficacious way of including all differently abled people is to persuade corporations to design their products and services so that much larger numbers of people can use them, thereby increasing their profits”. Vanderheiden adds a cautious endorsement to the notion that the market may be the best friend to the disabled consumer. “Is it possible, Yes. Is it commercial practicable? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. In the future, increasingly yes.”

Justifying his optimism about the future Vanderheiden points out that “the world used to be mechanical but now it is digital it can be more intelligent”, fancifully describing the possibility of “pea-size Web servers, in the $3 range, to link coffee pots and the like”, and, more practically, the use of a braille displaying keyboard to control a thermostat.

Back in the world of design there is good news for people with disabilities today, as well as in the future, as it has become clear that many good products for people with disabilities are simply good products full stop. A device for the hard of hearing might work equally well for people who have a temporary ear infection or work in a noisy environments. Predictive texting, originally developed for people with limited motor control in their hands, has proved to be a great success on Nokia mobile phones because we are all pretty constricted when trying to compose text messages with one hand on a twelve key input while strap-hanging on a bus. (Of course tweens will insist on ‘txtng’ but that is a cultural thing, akin to the language dissing popular among black ghetto kidz in Amerika.)

Whether products developed for people with disabilities in fact cross-over depends to an extent on whether the product is presented as being for that particular group. If its form and aesthetics say ‘disability’ it is unlikely to cross over – and unlikely even to be popular among the target audience. “The way you implement it is key,” notes Vanderheiden. As we ourselves know, we wouldn’t buy a car designed to appeal to our parents – and nor would they. (My dad, a case in point, just bought an MG sportscar, and is back where he started in his 20s.)

The flip side of this phenomenon is the concept of ‘inclusive’ design, which is based on the observation that it is easy to make a product difficult for people with certain disabilities to use by omission, when no extra time or resources would be necessary to ‘include’ them. As Include co-convenor Patrick Jordan argues, designers “should at least make an explicit decision to exclude certain groups”.

Inclusive design is in essence an expression of good user-centred design, and of course we would expect user-centred design to lay the basis for better products, a point confirmed by Sue O’Neill, diversity co-ordinator at DIY behemoths B&Q: “We know that if we get it right for a disabled person we get it right for everyone.”

Inclusive design is not the same as design-for-all, which has been a popular rallying cry in design (and particularly Web design) for many years, with the likes of Jakob Nielsen arguing, in his book Designing Web Usability, that “you should design for all screen resolutions”[v]. User-centred design should focus on the intended users of a product and, as Jordan’s comment well expresses, this doesn’t mean everyone who might use it. “There are no universal designs or designs for all,” argues Vanderheiden, while Professor Alan Newell notes that there are “often clear conflicts of interest between able-bodied people and disabled people, and people with other disabilities”, concluding that “universal accessibility may be a barrier to accessibility by most”.

What other implications does inclusive design pose for designers and design practice? Professor Bill Green of the University of Canberra believes that greater multi-disciplinarity will be necessary, while at the codeface there are some interesting design and manufacturing solutions that can help create inclusive products. Software and Web interfaces can certainly be designed to adapt to a variety of users –and Apple has been a pioneer in this area, allowing MacOS to be modified to work better for users with limited motor control and poor vision – while rapid prototyping and flexible manufacturing techniques are also lowering the cost of customising physical products.

Realising designs that will work under variation is a fascinating challenge, though Vanderheiden injects a note of caution. “We don’t always adjust products that could be adjusted, sometimes for good reasons such as predictability or software support.” Where we do choose to create mutable and customised products Professor Newell observes that testing these kinds of products will also be a challenge.

The ultimate challenge for designers and engineers is to abstract the interface from the device so that different interfaces can be used to access the same device in a way that optimises the interaction for the user – Vanderheiden’s braille keyboard-thermostat interface being a case in point. The lessons we can learn here will help solve the problems of creating designs that work across the Web, mobile phones, interactive television and platforms as yet un-hyped.

The discussion of disability highlights both the tremendous capabilities human possess, and the degree to which we can enhance them still further. However the debate has been too focused on our disabilities, and not on enhancing our abilities, an approach captured by Bill Green in his remark that “we are all of us disabled in some way”.

Technology, and particularly information technology, enables us to go beyond our naturally determined abilities to in effect become superhuman. As the development of technology progresses it is going beyond levelling us up to a point where it can lift everyone up, whether they be disabled, partially impaired or ‘fully capable’. This is why we so often find that products developed for disability are beneficial to a much broader group of people.

We should also be clear that most improvements in technology and design for people with disabilities result from product development aimed at people without disabilities and that design for one group should never be counterposed to design for another.

The way forward for design for disability is to tie a user-centred approach to the promotion of technological progress – an approach from which everyone stands to benefit – and to move beyond plain functionality to create products that are a joy to use.

Research and Reference

Ben Shneiderman’s work on universal usability http://universalusability.org/

Conference on Universal Usability, founding general co-chair by Ben Shneiderman’s http://www.acm.org/sigchi/cuu/

Universal Usability in Practice http://www.otal.umd.edu/UUPractice/

Microsoft Accessibility guides http://www.microsoft.com/enable/

Design Council E-Futures forum ‘How can we design for a socially inclusive e-future?’ April 2001

http://www.design-council.org.uk/designhorizons/bookshelf2.html#title11 [link not currently working]

User Centred Design Methodology and Tools

http://www.stakes.fi/include/1-0.htm

Media accessibility

WGBH National Center for Accessible Media http://www.wgbh.org/wgbh/pages/ncam and http://ncam.wgbh.org/cdrom/guideline/

Phone user interfaces

Telephones – what features do disabled people need? http://www.tiresias.org/phoneability

Mobile phone guidelines http://www.stakes.fi/cost219/mobiletelephone.htm

Web design

Use of good HTML conventions (Bobby, etc). Abstraction of content and presentation (accessible version becomes just another output).

HTML Writers’ Guild http://www.hwg.org/

WebAble http://www.webable.com/

Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/wai/

IT Accessibility 2001 http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/itaccess01/ (NIST). See Mike Paciello presentation ‘WAI – ing the User Standard’

[i] Include2001 http://www.hhrc.rca.ac.uk/events/include/index.html

[ii] http://www.acm.org/sigchi/cuu/

[iii] http://www.sigchi.org/chi2001/

[iv] CHI2001 http://www.sigchi.org/chi2001/ and closing plenary ‘Why Do We? Why Can’t We? Future Perspectives and Research Directions‘ Gregg Vanderheiden, Trace R&D Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison

[v] Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity Jakob Nielsen (New Riders, 2000) p29 http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ISBN=156205810X