Mobile device impairment … similar problems, similar solutions?

Abstract

Previous studies have defined a new type of impairment in which an able-bodied user's behaviour is impaired by both the characteristics of a device and the environment in which it is used. This behavioural change is defined as a situationally-induced impairment and is often associated with small devices used in a mobile setting or constrained environment. Relatively little is known of its extent or the magnitude of the problems faced by the user. Here, we place the work that has been undertaken into a comparative framework of impairment in the context of data input. Our survey finds that 12 problems exist which define all impaired input and we look to understand the similarities and possible solutions in the new impairment group of small device users. For instance, from the literature, we find that users who are both situationally and motor impaired: press keys more than once, do not use enough force and so a key is not activated, and accidentally type keys in reverse order. A wealth of other errors exist in the motor impaired domain but work does not exist to support their existence in the situational domain. However, if commonalities exist for some – it seems work should be enacted to uncover the commonalities of all. Establishing these possible commonalities is important because solutions from one domain can be leveraged into another thereby saving the need to reinvent interventions which already exist elsewhere.

Keywords:

• web accessibility
• mobile Web
• situationally-induced impairments
• input technologies

Acknowledgements

This work was undertaken as part of the RIAM project funded by the EPSRC (EP/E002218/1) and conducted in the Human Centred Web Lab part of the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester (UK).

About: http://hcw.cs.manchester.ac.uk/research/riam/

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Notes

1. See http://www.w3.org/2005/MWI/.

2. By ‘Accessibility’, we mean having the ability to support access by disabled users.

3. User agent input refers to various approaches and techniques used to deliver information to the Web.

4. Output refers to the rendering of the Web content.

5. Here, we use the term ‘Web content’ to signify the rendered (presented) meta-elements and data. More accurately this is the Document Object Model (DOM – http://www.w3.org/DOM/ ).

6. In our work, we look at disabilities disjointedly to enable a better understanding of the user requirements and to enable the formulation of more accurate comparisons.

7. By ‘small device’, we mean a small device such as a mobile telephone, personal digital assistant, or any other hand-held device with a small keyboard and display.

8. Throughout this article, haptic feedback is used as a generic term that refers to both tactile and force feedback (Oakley et al. 2000).

9. This term has been defined in numerous ways; Nichols et al. (2001) defines as ‘over 58’.

10. In the UK: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/

11. Pointing is also referred as ‘target acquisition’, ‘area pointing’, ‘mouse pointing’, etc. which is the action of acquiring on-screen targets with the mouse cursor or with a pen/stylus (Wobbrock and Gajos 2007).

12. Also referred as accidental clicks (Trewin et al. 2006) or drifting errors (Moffatt and McGrenere 2007).

13. See ‘?’ in Table 2.

14. iPhone, http://www.apple.com/iphone/

15. Vocal sounds that do not correspond to any words or phrases in a language.

16. Mainly used on the BlackBerry and still requires sensitive control for accurate target acquisition.

17. Their study was conducted on the desktop and compared 20 people with motor impairments to 6 with no impairment. The experiment involved a typing task, a mouse task and an editing task.