Otago polytechnic accessibility software hub

Abstract

Accessibility software for motor impairment permits individuals who cannot access electronic devices through traditional input hardware to control desktop computers, tablets or smart phones despite moderate or severe dysfunction of motor control. Due to the relatively small size of the severely motor impaired community and the large fixed costs of developing accessibility software, commercial accessibility software solutions are often relatively expensive, with price ranges between 500-10,000 USD, which renders them unaffordable for a sizable proportion of the motor impaired population. Furthermore, due to the modest potential for profit of the accessibility software market, certain technologically feasible accessibility software solutions are often not even developed by commercial companies. Until recently, open source accessibility software solutions have been relatively scarce and the existing ones do not cover the entire range of available commercial software solutions. In this work, we present an initiative created by scholars at Otago Polytechnic to address this mismatch. We have leveraged capstone projects of our Information Technology degree program to guide students towards the creation of a range of open source accessibility software solutions that are made widely available through an online repository. Thereby, motor impaired users with limited financial means can use our software for free to interact with computers. The open source nature of our projects makes it possible for computationally skilled software developers to extend our software solutions by adding new features or improving existing functionality. We present here the first applications created by our initiative and the corresponding online repository where we make them available to address the needs of the financially constrained motor impaired community.