Open    Access



Modelling the User



Author(s)

Evangelos Bekiaris, Maria Gemou, Karel Van Isacker, Karin Slegers, Lieve Laporte, Nicky Salmon, Luis Miguel Bascones, Mercedes Turrero and Ivan Carmona

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DOI:10.17265/1934-7332/2013.07.001

The relatively high percentage of people with disabilities in Europe combined with the facts of ageing population, strong
relation of impairment to age, and as State of the Art shows, dissatisfaction or even unawareness of people with disabilities of available assistive technology are revealing the necessity to incorporate a user-centric approach that beyond 2nd generation practices will achieve to provide embedded and built-in accessibility solutions, as well as toolkits for developers, for “engraving” accessibility in existing and emerging mass-market ICT-based products, aiming to make accessibility open, plug and play, personalised and configurable, realistic and applicable in various contexts, keeping always the user in the loop. The AEGIS (Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards) IP (Integrated Project) of the 7th European Framework Programme seeks to determine whether 3rd generation access techniques will provide a more accessible, more exploitable and deeply embeddable approach in mainstream ICT (information and communication technologies). This paper presents the holistic UCD (user-centered design) implementation plan, upon which AEGIS has been based in order to achieve its targets, starting from modelling its target users, in the most efficient way possible.

Accessibility, open source, UCD, mobile applications, desktop applications, RIA (rich internet applications), people with disabilities.