A UCD approach towards the design, development and assessment of accessible applications in a large scale European integrated project

Abstract

ÆGIS (Open Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards) is a user-centred project, involving several user groups (users with visual, hearing, motion, speech and cognitive impairments as well as application developers) throughout the design, development and assessment phases. In this paper the holistic UCD (User Centred Design) approach of the project is introduced. This approach ensures that the project's objectives to determine whether 3rd generation access techniques will provide a more accessible, more exploitable and deeply embeddable approach in mainstream ICT applications (desktop, rich Internet and mobile applications) are met, with the full support and involvement of a huge end-user group in every single step of the design, development and deployment of accessible mainstream ICT. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.