Archive for the ‘Research’ Category
One thing I would like to explore (but I’m not promising anything)
There’s been a theme that I’d like to explore with some research and development which has been on the cards for 18 months or so. Basically, a lot of good work has been made in making the web accessible to its readers. Sites are generally structured better, with fairly good practice established as a norm in the culture of web development. What isn’t so good is the accessibility of contributing to the web – the tools that allow people to make sites, portfolios, flash interactives etc etc etc are not particularly easy to use, especially if you have some form of impairment.
So, I’d like to take up the opportunity to research what human-computer interface steps can be taken to improve the lot of people contributing to the web, making things more accessible and more understandable for all.
To do this properly would require lots of user testing with a representative set of creative people with disabilities. This is a fairly resource-intensive activity but would yield great dividends. To take this further would probably entail setting up a workshop programme that made the users almost the designers of their own tools. There’s a concept called “Participative Design” (which emerged from Sweden in the seventies) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design – it’d be interesting if this could be applied to this concept.
