Certainly the proliferation of touch input is one that stands to create a lot of access issues for alot of people – and I don’t think just those with disability – they’re just the obvious frontline, as usual.

a very interesting read. Personally I have been worried about the accessibility of Touch-based devices for the visually impaired. There is little accessibility due to the lack of physical keyboards, and a long way to go for voice interfaces. Design of the iPhone family and the Ultra-Mobile PC definitely overlooks the visually impaired.

These issues revealed themselves to me during a project that some friends and I undertook, outlined in a paper I presented. http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~confsec/IUI/proceedings/data/papers_short/jagdish_deepak.pdf

The project had some exposure, but we did not et answers about the accessibility of touch devices in the future.

Thanks

No it’s not just the iPhone. The laptops only having touch is bigger issue for me personally, and when you realize that going away from Apple also doesn’t offer a solution as most other manufacturers also use touch pads exclusively.

Also touch is an issue on the iPod Nano & Classic navigation wheels – I had to sell the Nano I won at WordCamp as I couldn’t use it functionally. I now use a Shuffle as it doesn’t use touch, however that also means I’m forever hunting through the thing to find the podcast I want as there’s no screen.

Of course there’s other brands of MP3 player that I could use that don’t use touch – hardly so with laptops.

It’s when a technology posing access barriers becomes so pervasive that it is when it starts to get troubling — imagine if all cars from all manufacturers were minis!

Dave