SoKeyTo: A Tool to Design Universal Accessible Interfaces

Abstract

Many activities of daily living, such as picking up glasses, controlling the house environment, typing text … can become insurmountable for people who have upper extremity disabilities. The alternative to ask for human help is to use some assistive technologies (AT) to compensate for their motor impairment. There are a lot of available AT responding to these needs. However, there are two limitations. The current devices force the handicapped person to use different ATone for each activity and to acquire another AT if his/her impairment changes. The SoKeyTo platform is an environment which offers functions to design virtual interfaces (robotic arm, home control and virtual keyboard for text input). We analyzed and compared SoKeyTo and other toolkits. The SoKeyTo platform offers configuration options for the interaction techniques, the design of buttons according to the needs and the abilities of the user and the multimodal feedback linked to these buttons. We describe the characteristics of two interactive interfaces designed with SoKeyTo. We report results from a utility and usability questionnaire from trials conducted with two representative end users. The questionnaire also showed a strong interest of the SoKeyTo tool.

Keywords: Assistive technologies, Augmentative and alternative communication, virtual interfaces, persons with upper extremity disabilities

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe100834