"Socially-Informed Accessible Technology: Improving Access to Technology, Information, and People"

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Many of the 4.4 million Canadians with a physical, cognitive, or sensory disability have difficulty using computer technology or find that it does not fully meet their needs. Many efforts have been directed at harvesting computational power for the benefit of disabled users. These efforts have been directed both at how to make computer systems more accessible to diverse abilities, and at how to design systems to help disabled individuals in their everyday lives. Yet many such devices are abandoned, or never adopted in the first place. One potential reason for this is that work to date has focused extensively on disabled users, without sufficiently considering how each user fits within his or her social environment. Social context can have simple but power influences. For example, a man with hand tremor may choose to use a computer mouse (though he would find a trackball easier and more efficient to use), simply because it is the preferred device of his wife and children. Or, an elderly woman may choose to use a complicated, feature-rich email client (though a simpler one would meet her needs) because her only source of technical guidance is her "techie" grandson. Social relationships can have positive influences as well. Notably, small powerful devices such as smart phones offer unprecedented potential for enabling caregivers to provide distributed support to a disabled person, and novel communication technologies offer new potential for connecting isolated individuals to loved ones. The goal of this research is, thus, to develop new generation assistive devices and accessible technologies that are sensitive to the social environments within which they will be used, and that seek to leverage those relationships to improve assistance and support. Individual projects will focus on designing for a specific target population, and across projects the findings will be synthesized to form guidelines for designing socially-informed accessible technology.