Inclusive Design

Main Goal of inclusive design: make system accessible and usable to as many people as (reasonably) possible

How to achieve this:

• consider disabilities already in your design process
• optimize the system for the specific user with specific needs
• for evaluation broaden the participant group: diverse, great variety
  What to avoid:
• make assumptions about your users (using stereotyping, patronising attitudes and/or language, stigmatizing and incorrect terminology)
  instead: ask people how they like to be referred to 
• design and test with "healthy users" (only university students)
  instead: involve people from target group eg. by doing a focus group/ mutual learning or design workshops, involve them from earliest stages
  consider effort, that is time consuming and the specialised knowledge that the design requires.

Different kind of disability grouped by their frequency in occurrence:

1. Permanent: Cognitive disability
2. Temporary: Learning, drugs, distress
3. Situational: Interruption, distraction

disabilities grouped by their cause:

1. perceptual
   blind, deaf, partially sighted -> use close captioning, support for screenreaders
2. motor
   limited or no use of limb(s), use of mobility assistance -> provide physical accessibility (eg. no stairs)
3. cognitive
   dementia, down syndrome, autism, neurodiversity -> communication needs and preferences
4. social and economic factors
   money, culture, environment -> affordable design, fit in life and environment

Accessibility

• is related to usability
• all users should have equivalent experience
• inclusive design also beneficial to all users
• universal design

Different kind of access:

1. direct
   system is accessible without assistance
2. indirect
   system is accessible with an EXISTING assistive technology (e.f. screen readers)

Inclusive design addresses:

• Social aspects (e.g., manners)
• Cognitive processes (e.g., memory)
• Affective processes (e.g., trust)
• Perceptual/ motor skills (e.g., tremor)

Examples:

VESSEL support
Virtual Environment to Support Societal participation Education of Low-literates

• disability/ problem:
  • Low-Literates, that have problems in reading media and instructions, filling out forms, financial management, ...
  • leads to shame in isolation of that person
  • stagnating general development
• solution:
  • personal learning environment to exercise practical situations
  • Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) that guides the learning process to improve learner's self-efficacy
  • practice general situations (e.g. Citizen's office) and useful tasks (e.g. filling out forms)
  • comprehensive learning support: combination of social, cognitive and effective support supports improvement of self-efficacy
    ECA tries to motivate and encourage the user to do the tasks
    Is understanding, when the user has difficulties
    complements 

Exoskeleton design

• during the evaluation of an exoskeleton, they found out that lots of difficulties occured due to diversity:
  • man <-> woman
  • person sitting in wheelchair <-> healthy person
• women had pain using the exoskeleton, that men didn't have
• lessons learned: involve user form the earliest stages in your design, not only in the evaluation

Inclusive Design in the SALLe Project:
Since our robot is made to be used by people with dementia we have to consider the following possible disabilities and find a way how to address these disabilities and make our robot accessible to PwD: