Accessibility Support for Older Adults with the ACCESS Framework

Abstract

Equitable access to the digital economy is predicated on the usability of the devices that are used to access electronic goods and services, with computers being the primary mechanism for many users by which this is currently done. For novice users with special interaction requirements, current arrangements for enabling accessibility support are suboptimal. Older users in particular require special consideration with regards to the design of software support packages to ensure the burden of knowledge required to configure a system is reasonable. This article describes the ACCESS Framework, a novel open-source, plug-in enabled software framework designed to address some of the issues around providing accessibility support on the desktop. The framework employs a system through which corrections are successively adapted to an individual user's preferences. Through empirical work with older adults, the framework has been shown to provide an understandable, appropriate, and effective way to enable accessibility support.