Multiple Perspectives on Interaction Design for Older People
This week the 27th International Technology and Persons with Disabilities (CSUN 2012) conference begins in San Diego. I will be contributing to three sessions (a discussion panel and two papers) all now highlighted on my diary page and available on the conference web pages. It looks like papers will not be available until after event itself. As a result, mine are available here for preview and comment. Hopefully they will be of interest to general accessibility/social media readers as well as delegates. First up (and previously blogged) was: “Peer-to-Peer Accessibility in Social Networks“, a paper for a session that will be exploring how web accessibility can be socially mediated by peers within social networks, using evidence from research with disabled students at UK Universities. Second, a preview of the panel discussion “Does Accessibility have to be Perfect?” has been previewed for discussion over at Henny Swan’s blog. Please head over there and check it out.
Finally, I will be presenting a paper on aspects of the MyUI.eu project. The paper is entitled “Interaction Design for Older People”. Beneath this rather generic title, I will be specifically focussing on the tensions raised by multiple perspectives on disability and aging in interdisciplinary work. The paper’s introduction is reproduced below. A PDF of the full document (approximately 1,000 words) available below, both for download and embedded in Google’s PDF viewer. If you would like to read the paper in a different format, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Interaction Design for Older People
This paper highlights an approach to promoting e-Inclusion which focuses older users in context. It is based on research conducted as part of the user-centred, collaborative work of the MyUI project (Mainstreaming Accessibility through Synergistic User Modelling and Adaptability). The research has raised important conceptual issues during its conduct, particularly regarding the ‘practical ethics’ of modeling disability and age-related impairments. In short, there is no neutral language with which to describe disability [1, 2, 3], as such all research is conducted through a particular ideological lens. In this interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research, the application of critical perspectives, grounded in social theory and disability studies, has offered fresh insight into the conception of impairment and disability amongst the technically-based prerogatives of human factors and HCI research. This paper introduces the MyUI project and the value of applying post-structuralist approaches from critical disability studies for human factors research.
