This web site was built by graduate students in the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland, College Park as part of a class project for Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (Computer Science 838S) in the Spring of 2000. The problem of universal accessibility of technology has recently become a hot topic, due partly to the U.S. Department of Commerce reports on the "Digital Divide." (http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/digitaldivide/) These reports found that certain groups of people, notably those of high and low income and education, have widely different accessibility to technology. However, perhaps an even more challenging problem to address is that of universal usability. Even if technology is made more affordable and accessible, it still must be usable by a wide variety of people – experts and novices, abled and disabled – using a wide variety of hardware and software – old and new, text-based and audio/video. Universal usability has thus become another related, but distinct area of research
This web site seeks to identify some of the major issues faced by hardware and software designers who wish to build with universal usability in mind. The Table of Contents to the left contains a list of papers on topics related to universal usability organized into two groups. The first group, User Communities, identifies some of the groups of people who require special considerations when designing hardware and software. The second group, Hardware and Software, looks at the problem from the other direction and identifies hardware and software solutions to usability issues that effect a number of groups. All of the papers were written as resources to provide guidelines for practitioners. A collection of Related Links from all of the papers was also compiled as a resource for finding more information. The ACM Conference on Universal Usability (www.acm.org/sigchi/cuu), November 16-17, 2000, will address these issues. The editoral board for this website consisted of Hilary Browne, Jeff Carver, and Erica Kolatch. Our main task was to coordinate this website. To do that, we developed a template for the papers to ensure a relatively consistent format. We also grouped the papers into categories, collected all of the links, and developed the table of contents for the site.
Editorial Board