The Case for the Radically Simple Interface and Intelligent Information System
Visual Impairment and Blindness
7.1 Everything that has been said so far in general terms about people who experience a functionality gap between themselves and information systems applies even more critically to blind and visually impaired people (VIPs):
- The use of the qwerty keyboard without visual prompts and hand/eye co-ordination requires a high level of skill
- The mouse is unusable
- Accessing and retaining large quantities of information is more slow and difficult when it is presented sequentially (on a braille display or speech output
- Diagnosing systems faults is more difficult when an accessibility interface overlays a standard system.
7.2 There are, however, a large number of additional factors; VIPs:
- Find spatial navigation more difficult and often get lost, particularly in nested boxes
- Waste huge amounts of time ploughing through repeat metadata and material they do not want
- Are likely to know less about what is possible.
7.3 Although these problems apply acutely to blind people, they also apply to some extent to those with limited vision:
- Enlargement limits effective navigation
- Complexity hinders trouble free enlargement.
7.4 So VIPs share the general requirement of a large section of the population but for more particular and pressing reasons. It is not so much, then, that VIPs require a specialised human/computer interface experience but that they would benefit more than most from a system which was sensitive to human factors in general and the needs in particular of those alienated by professionalist systems.