Modelling the User

Abstract

The relatively high percentage of people with disabilities in Europe combined with its aging population, the strong relation of impairment to age, and people with disabilities‘ dissatisfaction with or even unawareness of available assistive technology, reveal the necessity to incorporate a user-centric approach that, beyond second-generation practices, will provide embedded and built-in accessibility solutions, as well as toolkits for developers, for 'engraving' accessibility in existing and emerging mass-market ICT-based products, aiming to make accessibility open, plug and play, personalized and configurable, realistic and applicable in various contexts, always keeping the user in the loop. The ÆGIS IP project seeks to determine whether third-generation access techniques will provide a more accessible, more exploitable and deeply embeddable approach in mainstream ICT. This paper presents the holistic User Centred Design implementation plan, upon which ÆGIS has been based, in order to achieve its targets, starting from modelling its target users, in the most efficient way possible.