Design of virtual environment input devices for people with moderate to severe learning difficulties - a user-centred approach

This paper describes the continuation of research introduced in a previous paper: ‘Access to Virtual Learning Environments for People with Learning Difficulties’, presented by the Authors at ICDVRAT 2000 in Sardinia. The research stems from the development of virtual environments (VEs) for people with learning disabilities and findings of usability difficulties with the computer input devices. The first stage of the study, ‘understand and specify the context of use’, was achieved by conducting a Usability Context Analysis (UCA), which included an analysis of the user population, task and working environment review. The next stage, before proceeding to concept design, was to identify any existing computer input devices that satisfied the device requirements. No satisfactory match was found. Concept design generated many new concepts through the employment of concept generation methods, which were guided by the design specification. A concept selection matrix was then used to select the best concept against the device requirements. Evaluation of the chosen manufactured concept (VR1) followed. Objectives of this user-based assessment were to evaluate the usability of the new input system, to ascertain whether a User Centred Design methodology is a successful approach. The results of this study show that VR1 has greater usability than the more commonly used joystick and mouse for this user population.