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General data about the SME and clients
- Occupational therapist for Vision Technology Services at OCAD U
- Sees clients on a regular basis (4/week)
- Client demographic:
- More adults than children, with most adults being 50+
- Roughly equal split gender-wise
- Half are on government ODSP (Ontario Disability Support Program)
- Occupationally:
- Some have small part-time jobs (e.g., at a store)
- Those who do not receive ODSP support are working if within working age, mostly in a professional setting (office work, teachers, etc.) that depends on computers
- Technical ability:
- Most clients depend on the use of the computer
- Computer Client computer savvy depends largely on age
- Older clients less likely to be computer savvy (, though some are)
- Most clients are familiar with basic operation of email, internet browsing, basic word processing, etc.Some
- Some clients have more involved usage of the computer (finance, etc.), many use it for social networking (Facebook, etc.)
- Most clients have used a computer in the past, though some have little orhave almost no experience
Client challenges
- Most clients have low-vision or blindness
- Non-vision issues
- Mainly brain-related (e.g., CP, stroke, autism, developmental delay, Down syndrome, brain injury)
- Some with wrist injury, carpel tunnel
- Vision disabilities include:
- Low-vision
- Photo sensitivity to glare or bright lights
- Users with this issue often prefer black backgrounds
- Difficulty tracking (identification + tracking)
- Fatigue (esp. eye fatigue)
- Field cuts
- Central vision only
- Peripheral vision only
- Blind spots
- Floaters
- Double vision (often caused by one eye pointing in a different direction than the other)
- Considerations: if double vision is vertical, we can crop the line above and below to enable focus on the line; if double vision in horizontal, can increase letter/word spacing
- Colour blindness
Range of preferences
- Ability to change colour schemes (SME isn't sure if clients use this on the web, but can imagine that it would be)
- Contrast (mainly high)
- Black background, if photo-sensitive
- Bold letters
- Clear landmarks on the page to help navigation when zoomed
- Screen reader accessibility: meaningful links, structure, etc.
- Most clients prefer sans serif fonts for reading on the computer
- Larger text size
- Spacing between lines
- Also spacing between letters and words, but this is less often
Things that would be nice to have
- Real-time OCRing of images in websites
- More portable options for ATs (equipment that looks less like adaptive technologies, and are lighter and easier to carry)
- Better OCR
- Identification of cursor, cursor targeting
- Some solution for information overload
- For some clients, the amount of information that's presented dramatically slows the processing of what they see
- They need a solution for helping to identify what they're looking for within the deluge of information (recognize items in a slew)
- Like a list of things, or a view of the breadth with help directing to the appropriate places
- Existing solution: Dolphin Guide (menu-driven simplification system)
- Speech synthesis still sounds mechanical and not human
- Often partial vision clients are visual learners, and the auditory alternatives aren't good enough