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2013
Book Article
Titel
Immersive accessibility engineering
Titel Supplements
Designing inclusive products
Abstract
Inclusive design is a declared political intention in Europe. Enterprises are expected to take their social responsibility by providing accessible products. But inclusive design must also meet economic criteria and balanced entrepreneurial decisions are needed. Added market potential shave to be traded off against the required additional effort for an inclusive design. To design inclusive products a new type of engineering competence and function is needed: accessibility engineering. It needs in particular tools for usability and user experience validation. While tools like design guidelines are widely in use e. g. in human-computer interface design or design of facilities there is still a lack in engineering tools for simulation. European projects like VERITAS extended the state of the art. VERITAS developed an open simulation platform and an immersive platform for such purpose and proved their usefulness for various products and disabilities. It was shown that Virtual Reality can contribute to the design of accessible products by providing a first person experience to the designer from the perspective of users with disabilities. Furthermore VR can provide an immersive interface to usability simulation applications based on user models of disabled users. The user model specification of several European projects (VUMS cluster) is proposed for standardisation as a contribution for implementing the European Disability Strategy.