The document discusses the evolving landscape of accessibility in an era of touchscreens, gestures, voice assistants, and other natural interfaces. As these technologies become mainstream, they introduce new accessibility challenges. Standards like WCAG and WAI-ARIA provide frameworks, but may need to be updated to address accessibility in contexts like mobile use and distracted environments. The lines between assistive and mainstream technologies are also blurring, requiring reexamination of approaches.

1. Accessibility
in the world of touch-screens
and other natural interfaces
Samir Dash
2014

2. Accessibility
Ensuring a product/service
that is equally functional to all
users regardless of abilities or
limitations.

3. With technology the
assistive technologies
are improving
overtime. Possibly the
next solution
in assistive
technology?

4. Catering to special needs of a visually disabled person
through voice assistance + screen reader
Its becoming a norm of having a smart assistance that can
respond with results with support of voice input & output +
inbuilt screen reader type tech.
Lines between accessibility technology and
Technology for Mass are getting blurred.
Partially visually challenged person using magnified interface
to be able to see bigger UI elements .
Car-mode in mobile device presenting UI elements in a bigger
sizes for usage while driving..

5. What used to be a special
need is becoming a general
need for mass use.
No more point and click
Touch screens gestures & Voice input
No more the need to see to the display output
Voice Assistants
No more need to find manually
Smart Assistants with predicative technology & machine learning

6. While driving a car I can not frequently see what is happening.
Situational Disabilities Use-cases
are defining the new age devices,
wearable & smart interfaces
Out of screen 3D gestures for person
in motion.
Solving input issues for a significantly
smaller screen wearable.

7. Situational Disabilities Use-cases
are defining the new age devices,
wearable & smart interfaces
While driving - solving the issue of
controlling the device with gestures
While driving- solving the issue of text
input with smart voice integration

8. BEFORE NOW
Accessibility issues
have their roots in
Usability issues
in specific scenarios
Accessibility Issues
=
Usability Issues
As mass users devices are are
getting affected
Changing philosopy...

9. Welcome to the world of
changing needs
New challenges in implementation
of accessibility for web content (?)

10. Web Accessibility Technologies & Practices
• WCAG 2.0
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• MWBP 1.0
Mobile Web Best Practices
• WAI-ARIA
Web Accessibility Initiative Accessible
Rich Internet Applications

11. It’s a Common Sense
The approach working for a
situation ...

12. It’s a Common Sense
... may not work for another!

13. Nod seamlessly
transforms your
movements into
commands. It brings
the world around
you to life, as you
control everything
from your laptop to
your living room
lights with a wave of
your hand.
Fin is a small
wearable of its kind,
a trendy gadget that
you can wear on
your thumb, which
helps you to control
your entire digital
world

15. This is where we are heading…
Source: https://realsenseappchallenge.intel.com

16. Future of our interfaces..
Looks Cool. Huh?

17. Really Cool?

18. The problem exponentially grow
when special needs start define
the main stream devices.
When normal users start using special assistive
technologies for normal usage and remove basic
philosophies & frameworks in work till now, fall flat as
the new production does not support .

19. BEFORE
Normal PC, key inputs, display - main stream
Gestures, voice – assistive alternatives
Turing 180 degree!
NOW
Gestures, voice – main stream
Normal PC, key-input , display - assistive alternative

20. Ethical or not, modern technologies are more enabling
people to use HCIs to access web info in distracted
environments, while in-motion and while multi-tasking
giving raising to it’s own set of problems which were not
known in PC era.

21. Web content being accessed by user
is not the same form any more!

22. WCAG 2.0:
Accessibility supported technologies
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0

23. MWBP 1.0:
Started as an initiative to provide mapping between
web2.0 rich content and Accessible Technology (AT)
Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0
Mostly focuses on:
• Presentation of document structure
• Dynamic content updates
• Keyboard accessibility enhancements
• Widget accessibility

24. Why Rethink& Improve?
To answer these questions:
• how normal people use new age interfaces/devices interfaces
that are breaking age old display-input based systems.
• How normal people use these in situational disabilities.
• How disable people use these new age.
• How disable people use these new age interfaces in
situational disabilities.

25. “Mobile First” & “Gesture First”
to Keyboard
Designs that are driven by “mobile first” & “gestures first” kind of
philosophy must think of accessibility in terms of
1. Alternative fall-backs :
1. Voice alternative ? Can I connect a keyboard and mouse?
2. Multi-touch/Gesture alternative? single handed support? single finger gesture ?
gesture less input?
3. Can I connect a magnifier to the existing small screen?
4. Voice display less alternative? Display ?
2. Retaining the semantic meaning of change of medium
1. Information chunk with attributes like color, size, placement, form, shape with
meaning needs to be translated meaningfully for new paradigms.
2. Contextual smartness needs to be translated to different forms.

26. Accessibility
issues for new
generation
interfaces
New genie in the bottle!

27. Visual cues of chunking of information
makes communication effective and fast.
Visual cues include spatial hierarchy of
information.
Moving to voice enabled system lacks
this effectiveness. Voice based systems
are linear. This is evident in normal
screen reader or similar NLP supported
translations.

28. Touch enabled
display have
their own
problem to
share.
• Loss of tactile feedback
• Lack of physical stability
• Hard to select targets in un-optimized
UI (viewport ,
content attribute)

29. Voice has been used
popularly to solve input
challenges in small-display
or zero-display devices.

30. Add potato to
my shopping
list..
Sure. Tomato
is added to
your list.
Noisy surrounding
Voice based systems have their part of the stories!
Localisation/accent issues
Find paintings
of last supper.
Found one
link for “last
super hero”.

31. New age eco-system architectures also
contribute to the new accessibilities issues.
Search from my
emails for Bob’s
that has his contact
number.
Sorry. Can’t search.
No internet connection
available.
Please connect to a
network and try again.
small display + small power + data in cloud

32. small display + small power + data in cloud +
dependency on constant connectivity
BEFORE NOW
Map Data and the voice-over
mechanism both are with in the
device.
Map Data and the voice-over
mechanism both are in the cloud that
can be accessed over network.

33. Please select
your country:
Armenia
Bahrain
Botswana
Cameroun
République
Centrafricaine
Côte d'Ivoire
Egypt
Guinea-Bissau
Guinée
Guinée Equatoriale
India
Israel
Jordan
Oman...
UI translation to voice

34. UI translation to voice (with intelligence)
with the understanding the semantic need
what is your
country name?

35. Too much Cognitive load in a display-less world ?
• What is that number I just entered before 3 ?
• Well what was the fifth option the system said?
• I need to send the last email Bob has sent ?

36. Accessibility is impacted if the
information gained in not
effective.
It makes it critical for us to
understand that voice/NLP
based systems are more being
used in fast-moving
environments, where speed and
accuracy is important to make use
of the information in a
meaningful way.
The new
accessibility
challenge is to
retain
“effectiveness”.
35 percent of
U.S. drivers
admit to
texting
behind the
wheel. Young
drivers 18 to
29 blew that
number away
with a
whopping 70
percent.

37. You need someone to
assist you intelligently!
• Predict user intention/need
• Understand semantically
• Understand the context of usage
• Provide usage models that is
effective to the context

38. Everyone is being affected!
Need to change business models
now based on accessibility!
Online Ad companies will have to come up with new ad
serving frameworks.
• How Google Ad will come on a pure voice enabled
environment?
• How Amazon will show ads while you browse a third party
site over a gesture controlled small screen like a watch ?
• Or a over a brain to brain interface?
A SUPER CRACK
IDEA!!!
Can we play a voice
based ad like we do
in music sites while
the user is accessing
his emails over NLP ?
What about priority
and criticality of
user needs!

39. Everyone is being affected!
New definition of
“responsiveness” of web!
In a display less world the web page has to be responsive
in a new dimension of rendering it. In a display enabled
world the verity will be more with minimal screens and
rest getting translated into other mediums like voice. So
all existing responsiveness and related frameworks have
to be updated.

40. Everyone is being affected!
No more pure screen reader business ! It’s
business about smart assistants only!
Dumb screen readers depending on tab index, may not be
potential help, rather more smart assistants are the way to go.

41. Everyone is being affected!
Opportunity?
Make the web-content/apps
intelligent enough for the new
devices and make it accessible
in a safer way!.
Without waiting for the smart devices and
smart technologies to solve new accessibility
issues, we need to have our information
system intelligent too!
How about
optimising
Yahoo/Gmail
interfaces for
driving mode?
35 percent of U.S. drivers admit to texting
behind the wheel. Young drivers 18 to 29
blew that number away with a whopping 70
percent.

42. But this will take time and how to predict the
specs of future HCI revolutions?
How to
future-proof
‘now’ ?

43. WAI-ARIA
luckily we have the bridge to future with us.
WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications)
is a technical specification published by the World Wide Web
Consortium that specifies how to increase the accessibility of web pages, in
particular, dynamic content and user interface components developed
with Ajax, HTML, JavaScript and related technologies.
As of March 2014, it was a Recommendation

44. Assistive
Technology
Web
content
WAI-ARIA started as an initiative to provide mapping between web2.0
rich content and Accessible Technology (AT)
Presentation of document structure Dynamic content updates
Keyboard accessibility enhancements Widget accessibility

45. Diversity in the
evolution of HCI can be
tackled through API
based framework
approach
WAI-ARIA Accessibility features across browsers have improved over time.

46. The WAI-ARIA approach :
the flexible stop-gap approach
designed for system evolution
It all started to plug the hole in HTML4 (or any other
mark-up language) to help web applications and web
pages to be made more accessible.
The ARIA specs says “It is expected that over
time, host language will evolve to provide
semantics for objects that previously could
only be declared with WAI-ARIA. When
native semantics for a given feature
become available, it is appropriate for
authors to use the native feature and stop
using WAI-ARIA for that feature”
Aria supported custom object
<div role=“heading” aria-level=“
2”>
I am a heading
</div>
Native object
<h2>I am heading</h2>

47. Future
Assistive
technologies
Past &
present
assistive
technologies.
WAI-ARIA can act as a bridge to future.
Though it has to transcend beyond just web content / mark-up over time.

48. Thanks.
I am accessible.
mobilewish@gmail.com
http://samirshomepage.wordpress.com
http://in.linkedin.com/in/mobilewish
http://www.behance.net/mobilewish
http://www.slideshare.net/MobileWish
http://www.youtube.com/user/mobilewish#play/uploads
http://samirshomepage.wordpress.com/feed/
http://twitter.com/mobilewish
https://plus.google.com/+SamirDash-mobilewish/posts
http://www.facebook.com/people/Samir-K-Dash/1046301826
ess_samir
Special thanks and credit goes to the copyright holders of some images used in this preso.