... well. No, son! We still have a long way to go. Indeed, Accessibility and Assistive Technologies are really just newborns. With no disregard for the excellent advances made in the last decades, still face several restrictions.
A few months ago I have made a presentation on Assistive Technologies for Spinal Cord Injuries. There are several solutions available for different impairments with several advantages and some disadvantages as well. See it below:
Two years ago I would see these approaches, be marvelled and innocently ask: are we there yet? What is missing for a tetraplegic to operate a computer (obviously this question does not consider the other losses tetraplegic users experience)?
Well, after being around several persons with tetraplegia I came to find that we are still in the begining and almost everything is still missing. The approaches, although valuable and suitable for particular situations, are rarely or never complete. They are fragmentary. As an example, we will look at a scenario where a tetraplegic person uses an eye-tracker to operate a computer. Well, we have seen eye-trackers and they are amazing. Actually, the user can be in front of the computer and control the mouse pointer and, with a little training, control any other application. Often, an integrated solution can offer access to the household appliances and enable the user to control his surrounding environment. Well, once again, why do I argue that we are so far away?
The answer relates to the ability to achieve therequired interaction conditions. Looking at the same example, the users need to be in front of the computer. And to be somehow restricted to that position. Well, I am a friend of some tetraplegic persons and they spend more than half their daily hours in bed....and does that have an assitive technology that assists them while in the chair, are not able to operate it in bed.We are talking part-time accessibility . Moreover, we are also talking about conditioned accessibility. The users still require a great deal of help from a third-party....And I am not just talking about the initial setup. Also I am not aiming at total independence (although that would be great). But a little liberty to choose is required.
This is my research focus and what I aim to achieve. Nowadays mobile devices play a weak role regarding assistive technologies for motorly disabled users but I believe that these devices characteristics make them a candidate solution to solve some of the aforementioned issues...I will come to you with this subject in another post.
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