Visualising the number of people who cannot perform tasks related to product interactions

Journal article (2013)

Authors

S. D. Waller University of Cambridge
M. D. Bradley University of Cambridge
Patrick Langdon University of Cambridge
P.J. Clarkson University of Cambridge
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Published Date

2013-8

Language

English

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Abstract

Understanding the number of people who cannot perform particular tasks helps to inform design decisions for mainstream products, such as the appropriate size and contrast of visual features. Making such informed decisions requires a dataset that is representative at the level of a national population, with sufficient scope and granularity to cover the types of actions associated with product use. Furthermore, visualisations are needed to bring the dataset to life, in order to better support comparing the number of people who cannot perform different tasks. The 1996/97 Disability Follow-up Survey remains the most recent Great British dataset to cover all types of ability losses that may be relevant to using everyday products. This paper presents new visualisations derived from this dataset, which are related to vision, hearing, cognition, mobility, dexterity and reach. Compared to previous publications on this dataset, the new visualisations contain task descriptions that have been simplified, described pictorially and separated out into different categories. Furthermore, two-dimensional visualisations are used to present exclusion results for products that require vision and/or hearing and for tasks that require each hand to do different things. In order to produce these new visualisations, the publicly available version of this dataset had to be reanalysed and recoded, which is described here-in detail.