Projects for Assistive Tech Fall 2005

Your major assignment this semester is to complete an individual project. You may choose to either work on making a website more accessible, or to create a new technique, tool, or method or study a technique, tool or method that is relevant to the theme of the course. Some project ideas are listed below.

As part of the project, you will be writing a proposal (either proposing which website to adapt, or what technique, tool, or method you will develop or study). Additionally, there will be two posters sessions at which interim reports will be due, and final presentations. At that time, 8 page long final papers will be due, in ASSETS format.

The structure of your project will approximate the following: proposal, design, implementation, and evaluation. Of course this will vary depending on the focus of your project. Additional information about what's expected in each portion of the project will be provided as the semester proceeds.

Some examples of possible projects:

• Help Working Order update their website and make sure it is accessible
• Investigate optimal scanning interfaces for a consumer at TRCIL, and design and test a solution. She can provide access to the source code of her existing interface.
• Create and test a new piece of assistive technology for someone. Be sure to test for poutential negative as well as positive impact of the technology.
• Investigate a model of people with disabilities or a method for doing a user study. In many cases, you will be asking how an existing method or model needs to be expanded for a specific disability. In some cases, you may be developing a new one.
• Create a tool or technique for supporting programmers or application developers in building accessible technology or testing technology for accessibility. A project like this should have a strong focus on reusability, something that will need to be demonstrated in your evaluation. An example is the Bobby tool for testing website accessibility.