Individual difficulties faced by persons with mobility impairments

Abstract

Disabled persons are experiencing additional difficulties when interacting with systems, applications or devices and also have their own unique requirements that enable them to use a system. If the design of the system does not support these requirements, people with disabilities will experience obstacles that may prevent them from interacting effectively with a system. This paper reports on the experience with designing an adaptive web portal that can be used by people with a variety of impairments. Highlighted is the fact that designing a system that is usable by people with various disabilities, and various severities of a specific disability, is not a trivial task. The paper specifically focuses on design guidelines that were highlighted by participants with mobility or motion impairments during a usability evaluation to show that even within a fairly homogeneous group, several individual differences will exist that may influence the design of adaptive systems.