Abstract
In this portion of an on-going effort to develop human factors guidelines for designing consumer products for the disabled a series of interviews and surveys concerning information displays was conducted in the homes of noninstitutionalized disabled people. The study covered a variety of disabilities, and where possible, individuals with several different levels of a given disability were included.
A detailed set of recommendations of specific displays for use on products to be used by disabled people proved impractical because interfaces which are found desirable by one disabled person are often a bad choice for another. It was found that good human factors design is especially appreciated by the disabled who, in general, are very smart consumers.
The most significant display usability problem for the sensory disabled subject is the mix of displays often found on top-of-the-line products. There is a ‘space-age/jet cockpit' look which seems to be popular in display design; it is not popular with the disabled. The current fad toward displaying information on a wide variety of alternating channels is likely to cause a display to be rejected by a disabled customer. In its original military/cockpit use this design approach serves the purpose of preventing the overload of any one human input channel. On household, or public access, interfaces where the intensity of information display is relatively low the use of alternating display channels often insures that a user not able to sense one of the output technologies is unable to use the device.
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