Heuristic standards for universal design in the face of technological diversity.

CENTRAL PRINCIPLE Important technologies require validated standards for the design heuristics that are used to design and evaluate them, but not necessarily identical heuristics for every technology. BACKGROUND Heuristic standards provide a valuable toolkit with which to evaluate the accessibility of modern information society technologies (IST). But can we apply the same heuristic, generic standards to all types of technological platforms, in the face of their growing diversity e.g. websites, social websites, blogs, virtual reality applications, ambient intelligence etc (Adams, 2007)? Or would it be wiser to expect that different technologies might require different, if overlapping, standards? Can we really expect to design the interface of a modern cell phone on the same basis as for a table computer? Most impartial observers would probably say “no”. How can we introduce a systematic and thorough approach to the diverse technologies that are seen or predicted to be seen? Work in our laboratory has explored two useful questions. First, how to computer literate users perceive the different technologies? Second, how can different heuristic standards be developed where needed?