Mapping User Accessibility Needs Systematically to Universal Design Principles

In a rapidly growing information-oriented society, people with disabilities and older people are faced with serious inconveniences in accessing IT products due to complicated use of technologies and poorly designed interfaces. To solve the problems, it is required for designers and engineers to find out and understand user needs, and then to figure out the functionalities and design characteristics to meet the needs. Figuring out the Engineering Characteristics (EC) of products from user needs for people with disabilities and older people who have problems using main stream products due to limited accessibility would take great efforts and time. We merged two important concepts of product design for people with disabilities and older people, accessibility and universal design, using an engineering design framework of QFD (Quality Function Deployment) to provide engineers and designers with a systematic methodology for universal product design. We adapted a technical report from the ISO/IEC JTC1 Special Working Group on Accessibility (SWG-A), the Information Technology – Accessibility Considerations for People with Disabilities – Part 1: User Needs Summary (ISO/IEC PDTR 99999-1), and mapped the detailed user accessibility needs to the guidelines of 7 universal design principles which are widely accepted. We explained how a process model was built for mapping relationship between the guidelines and user accessibility needs, and extracting the critical engineering characteristics for IT product design based on these two models. A model House of Quality(HOQ) was built for such procedures.