Development of the accessibility evaluation platform beyond digital divide

Abstract

We developed a web-based experiment platform for psychological experiments and questionnaire surveys to evaluate accessibility, especially for elderly participant studies. Our proposing system is an accessible experiment platform for experimenters and participants, which has necessary and sufficient functions for studies to solve many open questions of aging society, especially for evaluating accessible design. This system has three advantages. (1) No programming knowledge is needed for users. This system makes surveys and experiments possible only by inputting essential values and words such as a sentence of question, a file name of image to present, a numerical value of presentation time. (2) The System requirements are less severe than other systems. The user can run experiments on a PC, tablet, or mobile, without installing any specific software. If the study does not require strict control of environmental conditions, elderly people can join the survey at home or anyplace. Moreover, this system enables studies for elderly people without a lot of costs, since it is web-based and does not need to have many licenses. (3) Our proposing system has essential functions for basic psychological experiments. It is compatible with personal information protection, confirmation of written consent, design of the task procedure (randomize, block, shuffle), input and response (e.g., free description, evaluation axis, selection, coordinates of mouse click, and response time). The proposing experiment platform is useable for the accessibility study to fill in the gap of digital divide, especially the studies of human computer interaction in aging society.