The disability-simulator: simulating the influences of disabilities on the usability of graphical user interfaces

Today's software systems and especially graphical user interfaces are mostly designed to fit to the needs of an ideal target audience - most often purely focusing on young, physically and mentally healthy persons. Not even the development of tailored (e.g. to elderly people) user interfaces but also the testing is a challenging task, because a large set of test persons suffering from specific impairments needs to be recruited which in practice often is unfeasible and the reason for statistically insignificant results. But software systems and their graphical user interfaces have to be designed to cope with the special needs of also handicapped persons. In this paper we introduce a method to support the target oriented design process and evaluation of such graphical user interfaces by simulating specific disabilities and typical impairments. Therefore we emulate the influences of such impairments on the performance while using any graphical user interfaces by applying specific filter algorithms on the target interface. This enables evaluations of the GUI under realistic conditions without being forced to actually involve real impaired participants.