Impairment and Design

A recent post on the excellent A List Apart usability blog focussed on designing for the deaf, the *Deaf or the hearing impaired. There are some excellent writings on how to design for deaf and visually impaired people out there, so I'll not go over that, except to say maybe they're getting ignored.

A comment that caught my attention:

0.38% of America’s population is deaf. That’s 38 people in a stadium of 10,000, yet 50% of our time is spent blogging about them. I think if they spent as much time as we assume they do on the internet, they’d be insulted by all the wasted efforts. People already code sites with pure text/css now, and if there is Flash, it’s SIFR. I think this holy deaf talk is just trendy.

posted at 02:57 pm on August 12, 2008 by Michael Angeletti

There is something the poster is not realizing — we are all impaired to some amount. I realized this a few years ago as a musician, moving heavy amplifiers to gigs. Those little ramps that had been required by law (at least here in Australia) for wheelchairs were my saving grace.. instead of lifting the hefty equipment I could roll it into the building. It probably saved me more than once from back injury. And yet, there would be no way the institutions would have put in those ramps for my convenience.

And we are all time-impaired. If you compare iPhone's interface to traditional PDA you'll see that the iPhone usually has much larger, and easier to tap, targets and virtual buttons. Even with a stylus, most PDAs take a some very finite control. Fitts' law of course tells us that the smaller the target is, the longer it will take to aquire, so the cost to the some of us who have full control over our finger dexterity is still TIME. And time is the one thing we cannot get back.

A final aspect, and I do mean final, is that we all lose some of our sensory capacity and dexterity as we age. The device that was once small and nifty becomes 'fiddly' and then 'darling can you help me with this, I can't do it anymore'. So any design that gracefully lets the sensory-impaired will also be helping you in future as you slowly decline!

Arg.. time for a positive note! What about those wheelchair ramps? What would be the design equivalent? I would *love* to offer captioning on the video interviews I post. That would mean I no longer discriminate against hearing impaired. But think of the side benefits:

Scannable text — just read the bits if you don't have time
Searchable text. You, and Google can find any word spoken on a video. Think of all the great content locked up in YouTube because it's not easily searchable
Note-taking and quoting copy and paste
Contexts. In the office and can't make noise? You can watch with the sound down

I've looked around at possible services, for example everyzing.com but have found them cumbersome to use, and only partially accurate. Of course, machine translation of video audio is bad at this stage but I would happily make my own fixes to the text, and be happy for the community at large to make corrections.

But there are a host of improvements possible to current computer interaction. Grab any old person from your local retirement home and plonk them down in front of a computer, and watch them squint and possibly, curse the machine in front of them.



*Deaf, with a capital 'D' is how some hearing impaired people choose to define themselves, as a cultural group. They have a certain language (sign) speak cultural norms, and so forth