The field of computing is one that has a special relationship with disability due to both the many opportunities and many flaws that computers present with respect to disability access. However, despite many successes in this arena, the conferences and digital resources of the Association for Computing Machinery are still ...

For some people, interaction preference settings like large fonts or speech output are essential for technology access. We demonstrate a 'First Discovery Tool' intended as an easy and accessible way for people to discover and set preferences to address major access barriers. The tool is designed to support people who ...

In this forum we celebrate research that helps to successfully bring the benefits of computing technologies to children, older adults, people with disabilities, and other populations that are often ignored in the design of mass-marketed products. --- Juan Pablo Hourcade, Editor

Accessibility research studies often gather subjective responses to technology using Likert-type items, where participants respond to a prompt statement by selecting a position on a labeled response scale. We analyzed recent ASSETS papers, and found that participants in non-anonymous accessibility research studies gave more positive average ratings than those in ...

We interviewed adults with mild cognitive impairment working in a sheltered workshop and three support professionals about competitive employment in the community, and what concerns or barriers they may have. While individuals were most concerned about managing their health, professionals also described personal safety and productivity challenges. Families' worries about ...

This paper examines the use of touchscreen smartphones, focusing on physical access. Using interviews and observations, we found that participants with dexterity impairment considered a smartphone both useful and usable, but tablet devices offer several important advantages. Cost is a major barrier to adoption. We describe usability problems that are ...

Accurate pointing is an obstacle to computer access for individuals who experience motor impairments. One of the main barriers to assisting individuals with pointing problems is a lack of frequent and low-cost assessment of pointing ability. We are working to build technology to automatically assess pointing problems during every day ...

Pinching and spreading gestures are prevalent in mobile applications today, but these gestures have not yet been studied extensively. We conducted an exploratory study of pinch and spread gestures with seated participants on a phone and a tablet device. We found device orientation did not have a significant effect on ...

We examine three biometric authentication modalities -- voice, face and gesture -- as well as password entry, on a mobile device, to explore the relative demands on user time, effort, error and task disruption. Our laboratory study provided observations of user actions, strategies, and reactions to the authentication methods. Face ...

In this study, we explore the role of age and fluid intelligence on the behavior of people looking for information in a real-world search space. Analyses of mouse moves, clicks, and eye movements provide a window into possible differences in both task strategy and performance, and allow us to begin ...

Designers often struggle to create interfaces that are optimal for both younger and older adults, as they may interact differently with the same interface. Human-performance models have been used to aid designers in evaluating the efficiency of user interfaces. Can we create age-specific models to help designers create interfaces that ...

This study focuses on the use of web accessibility software by people with cerebral palsy performing three typical user tasks. We evaluate the customization options in the IBM accessibility Works add-on to the Mozilla Firefox browser, as used by ten users. While specific features provide significant benefit, we find that ...

We describe the motivation for research aimed at extending predictive cognitive modeling of non-expert users to a broader population. Existing computational cognitive models have successfully predicted the navigation behavior of users exploring unfamiliar interfaces in pursuit of a goal. This paper explores factors that might lead to significant between-group differences ...

This document contains information for organizers of academic conferences who wish to make their events as accessible as possible, so that people with disabilities can participate fully. It is not intended as an accessibility checklist or requirements document, but offers general ideas and information that conference planners may wish to ...

Human abilities and situations are idiosyncratic and may change frequently. Static one-size-fits-many accessibility solutions miss the opportunities that arise from careful consideration of an individual's abilities and fail to address the sometimes dynamic aspect of those abilities, such as when a user's activity or context causes a "situational impairment." The ...

Designers often have no access to individuals who use screen reading software, and may have little understanding of how their design choices impact these users. We explore here whether cog-nitive models of auditory interaction could provide insight into screen reader usability. By comparing human data with a tool-generated model of ...

This paper illustrates how some of the human–computer interaction patterns associated with Web 2.0 can degrade the user experience of those with particular cognitive disabilities. It also shows how changes to computer technology often do not threaten accessibility directly and immediately, but, rather, indirectly, by spawning new user interaction patterns ...

Users of small computational devices, such as Mobile telephones or Personal Digital Assistants, are situationally impaired by both the device and the context of the device's use. This paper describes empirical work which makes the link between the behaviour of motor impaired desktop users and non-impaired users of small-devices. This ...

Using evidence from a survey of 49 IBM Web developers we explore two concerns: barriers to the developers' designing accessible Web-based products, and what value they felt specific features in an "accessibility" tool might have. They found designing for accessibility difficult, but more surprisingly, they found using the test tools ...

Low-end mobile phones are becoming generally available throughout the world and the main window onto the Web. A large constituency for Web access is being created whose experience Web designers are not familiar with, particularly because of the central role of auditory, rather than visual access. This is analogous to ...