Building bridges between elderly and TV application developers

Abstract

The development of new digital TV systems and the design practices adopted in the development of new TV based applications often isolate elderly and disabled users. By considering them as users with special needs and not taking their problems into account during the design phase of an application, developers are creating new accessibility problems or just keeping bad old habits. In this paper, we describe a novel adaptive accessibility approach on how to develop accessible TV applications, by making use of multimodal interaction techniques and without requiring too much effort from the developers. By putting user-centered design techniques in practice, and supporting the use of multimodal interfaces with several input and output devices, we confront users, developers and manufactures with new interaction and design paradigms. From their evaluation, new techniques are created capable of helping in the development of accessible TV applications. Copyright © IARIA, 2012.