Discussions

Creating accessible touch/gesture based interfaces

Session Title

Creating accessible touch/gesture based interfaces

Presenter

Mark McKay, Industry Canada

Session Type: Discussion

Touch and gesture based interfaces are all the rage at the moment but only the iPhone 3GS seems to have given any thought to how disabled people would use a touch/gesture based interface.

During this discussion I would like to show some examples of accessible touch/gesture interfaces, talk about best practices for designing these interfaces in ways that are accessible to the largest number of disabled people and have others in the community share their experiences with designing accessible touch/gesture interfaces.

Biography

Mark McKay is a specialist in the field of Interaction Design for the disabled. He currently works as the lead Interaction Designer within Industry Canada’s Interaction Design Group (IDG) where he performs analysis and designs applications. He is also a founder and CEO of SpokenText.net (http://www.spokentext.net), an online text-to-speech converter for the print disabled, students and busy professionals from all over the world. His latest project is OnlyASurvey.com (http://www.onlyasurvey.com) the world’s only fully accessible CLF 2 compliant and 508 compliant online survey website.

In his long career of designing and developing accessible applications he has worked on everything from a speech enabled interface for an e-Learning CD-ROM to enterprise client management systems and applications for mobile devices.

Most recently Mark spoke at the UPA 2009 conference in Portland Oregon about his thoughts on accessible interface design techniques for web applications.