Universal Design Strikes Again

From Science Daily - new research about usability from the University of Manchester. Designs for accessibility will probably end up in the mainstream to help non-impaired users. Showing once again UDL works!

Mobile phone owners make similar mistakes to physically impaired computer users when using the technology, according to new research from The University of Manchester.

The first set of results from research funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) indicates that many able-bodied people make the same errors -- and with similar frequencies -- when typing and 'mousing' on mobile phones, as physically impaired users of desktop computers.

According to researchers in the School of Computer Science working on the RIAM (Reciprocal Interoperability between Accessible and Mobile Webs) project, mobile owners press the wrong key and press the same key repeatedly by mistake.

They also found mobile users tend to click the wrong area of the screen, click the screen multiple times in error, and make mistakes when trying to drag and drop information.

"These types of errors have been a big problem for physically impaired users for a long time," said Dr Yeliz Yesilada, a senior researcher on the project. "But solutions have been developed for all of these problems in the form of small assistive computer programmes, which supplement Windows and Mac operating systems."

Speech and Vista

Quick Post

Everybody’s down on Vista these days. If you’re installing new hardware broken drivers are a real issue.

There is one killer feature which might convince you to move away from XP – Speech Recognition. New and improved from speech recognition found in Office 2003. Definitely more command and control as well as improved dictation.

In the future, I’ll have a longer post about SR in Windows, but SR in Vista is moving Microsoft closer to Dragon Preferred.