Learning with the Fang

There is an old saying about quality and software development that sometimes rattles round my olde brain ‘quality must be baked in, not tested out’. I think a similar idea can be applied successfully when thinking about accessibility.

Dave (LifeKludger) Wallace has just given birth to an important post that has been gestating for a while:

Barriers aren’t new to me and neither is finding ways around, over
or through them. But what’s different is the pervasive nature of
‘touch’ technology of today. Here’s an exercise, try and find a laptop
that doesn’t use a touch pad or that has an alternate input method.
(only one I can find is Lenovo…and Apple won’t let me run OSX on that! — maybe this will!)

So I want to talk about it. I want to start a conversation — raise the issue into the social consciousness, as it were.

I see two areas where accessibility could be baked in to future touch based devices:

HARDWARE

Surely it makes sense to think about companion input devices for touch displays - such as stylus, ‘fake fingers’, gloves, laser pointers, whatever… when building production volumes of commodity technologies. Don’t leave it for an aftermarket hack or ‘kludge’, think about these things when developing hardware primitives in the first place.

SOFTWARE

Make sure hooks are in place for adaptive use of gestures.
Like the sticky keys or mouse drag interfaces - alternative ways to make multi finger gestures are pretty important to folk who cant use their fingers (if they have em). While it is not reasonable to expect software control of input/output devices to cater for every possible variation of the human condition, smart engineering could promote future unintended uses.

I would really hate to see governments impose a compliance view of accessibility on emerging consumer devices (they would probably ban all touch based devices). Instead, it’s up to us to get some smart thinking and design happening with a view to baking in accessibility.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

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