>>
Tom - I'm asking on behalf of South Lanarkshire Leisure and Culture
who are undertaking a project to put in touchscreens that will allow
visitors to carry out research on their digitised collections.
They've been told by their developers that an onscreen keyboard would
be "rather difficult to do on a touchscreen".
>>
Hmm, it's all really depends on what type of "research" you're
expecting visitors to do. If you're expecting them to type more than
a couple of sentences then the developers may actually have a point.
Touchscreen keyboards are definitely usable but they're also slower
and people type less - mainly because you can't touchtype. Notice how
all those "sent from my iphone" emails are usually quite short. If
you want people to type more, a proper keyboard will encourage them to do so.
>>
I was just wondering about the accessibility implications of kiosks
with 'digital' keypads. If the usual keyboard macros can be made to
work that's fine. How would vision impaired users manage though, if
the screens are smooth?
>>
Jon, this is an issue for pretty much all touchscreen type exhibits.
The real answer is that you make sure that the "keys" and active
areas are large, the contrast is strong and the exhibit gives audible
feedback when touched. The recommended minimum size for a touch area
is about 1 inch square. This all makes it usable if your sight isn't
that good.
Things aren't so good if you have almost no sight. Screen reader
functionality isn't usually practical in a gallery type setting.
Either the gallery ambient noise is too loud and you can't hear the
reader or some child discovers that they can make the exhibit talk
and everyone else in the gallery then wants to smash the exhibit to
make it shut up. You'd also need to make sure that partially sighted
people actually recognised the exhibit and knew how to work it. In
this respect web based exhibits have a lot of advantages for vision
impaired users, but that pretty much goes for most exhibitions which
consist of text and objects anyway.
Having said all this I did see an interesting case of totally blind
people being able to use iphones - as far as I can tell the phone
speaks to tell you what you're touching. I'm not sure how you select
things. It would be interesting to some more research on this and see
if it could be applied to touchscreen kiosks.
There's a lot more too this and it all varies according to particular
circumstances, but that gives you an idea.
Cheers
Joe
Joe Cutting
Digital exhibits and installations
www.joecutting.com
35 Hospital Fields Road, York, YO10 4DZ
01904 624681
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