For those who can’t get past 1998, universal design is about building things that everyone can use, no matter their level of capability. It is this simple:

“In terms of curriculum, universal design implies a design of instructional materials and activities that allows learning goals to be attainable by individuals with wide differences in their abilities to see, hear, speak, move, read, write, understand English, attend, organize, engage, and remember. Such a flexible, yet challenging, curriculum gives teachers the ability to provide each student access to the subject area without having to adapt the curriculum repeatedly to meet special needs.” ~ Curriculum Access and Universal Design for Learning

For goodness sake, universal design is trying to reduce the workload and number of special requests. That has to be positive, right?

The same goes for web sites. Good web designers/developers make an effort to create very well formed, semantic and progressively enhanced web sites. Not only does this approach help organize content in a cleaner, more reusable fashion, but paying attention to standards up front means that my web site is usable by everyone. I don’t have to go back and create a segregate site that is specifically accessible to certain people. Instead, I get to manage a single site that provides complete content to all users. With progressive enhancement (rooted in universal design principles), that content can be experienced by users with a broad range of capabilities.

People who don’t get UD feel that if they can’t have their Flash-only website, they are limited in some manner. I’ve found that web sites that follow a progressive enhancement model (build it first so it works for everyone, then add layers of the “whizz-bang” so you get the final product you want) end up more powerful and more robust. You have to work smarter on the front end, but there’s a kind of gestalt that happens when you do it well instead of just doing it with the latest/greatest technology (or the way you’ve always done it).

UD is meant to be an approach that takes the segregation out of accessibility efforts. Instead of accommodating after the fact, we are simply designing better content. If you do it right, you are not creating curriculum for the lowest common denominator. You are creating curriculum that can be consumed by the widest range of students possible. You are creating web sites that reach the widest possible audience. To attempt otherwise is to stick with the idea that all students (and web site visitors) are alike. We know they are not, and we know their learning/interaction styles are not the same (disability or no). Even if disabilities were not at issue here, universal design would still be the best way to create curricula, web sites, buildings, sidewalks, etc., because universal design recognizes that worthwhile learning and interaction cannot be homogeneous.

Pony up your stale curricula and inaccessible web sites, academia, and build something that works for each unique student or site visitor instead of something that works only for people with the same capabilities as you.

The curb cuts (ramps) on sidewalks or roads are probably the best examples of universal design. Think about how many non-disabled people use those ramps for pushing strollers/prams, riding bikes or skateboards. This was a solution that helped everyone.

Presenter

James Craig, Apple Inc

Date

Tuesday, March 17

Site

cookiecrook

Accessibility is more like a design process (judgment) than a technical coding process (validation). Universal access tools can help augment the interactive/sensory experience. Standardistas and technogeeks are getting into accessibility as another tool in the toolkit, but universal design is a more integrated approach. It has to be more than a patch with a new tool.

Accessiblity: tty machines
Universal design: Text messaging

Sound icon: the sound of trash being emptied. Unobtrusive.

James went on to talk about the creator of the segway and the IBOT, who is working on cybernetic replacements.

Gesture Recognition

A game called Copycat to teach sign language to deaf children. Johnny Lee and turning a Wii remote into a gesture recognition program. Minority Report. If there is gesture recognition productivity apps, the movements will likely be more reserved and finger-oriented.

Haptic/BCI Examples

Feedback related to a sense of touch (output from the computer). Braille-on-the-back. Haptic Radar headband (University of Tokyo)–”meta-perception”. JORDY (Joint Optical Reflective DisplaY). F-35 haptic sensor body suit and helmet. Jim Jatich (spinal injury; implanted electrodes into his hand–first cybernetic human) had his brain signals recorded while thinking about moving his muscles, then were mapped to the electrodes in his hands so he built new muscle memory to regain movement. Brain-computer Interface (BCI). Matthew Nagel (spinal column injury)–Brain Gate: record patterns of brain activity and uses that muscle memory to communicate to a computer.

Accessibility in a portal has always been a challenge. It has to do (initially) with boxes.

Many early portals used quite hideous tables to layout the screen. Hey, a portal is a set of boxes, right? Oracle Portal still enforces a level of table-as-layout. Tables aren’t evil, but as layout devices they make it difficult to control keyboard interaction on a screen. You have to really implement them right to keep them accessible.

But my main problem with tables as a way to arrange a set of boxes is that the boxes (portlets) on a page are not always neat, tabular data in common rows and columns. Tables are for arranging tabular data. That means there are common relationships among the data sets.

A portlet is too complex an interaction to always fit as “tabular data”. The ways I want to navigate a table of numeric data is usually different from the way I want to interact with a portlet or group of portlets. For example, do I have to tab through every portlet (and inside through the inner elements) on the screen in order to get to the one I want (with the keyboard)? Or can I jump through HTML headers like every other well-formed webpage I encounter?

The other problem with tables is styling. Think about how difficult it is to style your own profile at MySpace. Nested tables to the nth degree. Portals are susceptible to this trap as well. Taking a beautiful Photoshop design of a portal interface and then attempting to style unclassed table cells (when tables themselves tend to break certain CSS layout rules–or better yet, when there is inline CSS inside a table definition that you cannot override!) is an exercise in insanity. I mention this because the level of design control I have over my content is usually closely related to the level of accessibility I can ensure in a page.

So the first accessibility challenge for portals is having enough control over the page layout interface to display portlets on a page in a way that is semantic and easy to interact with via a keyboard. The second is having enough freedom to make it look great.