Enhancing Internet Access for People with Disabilities

Abstract The EIA project was funded by the “Online Public Access Initiative”, a federal initiative of the Australian Department of Communications and the Arts. The project was designed to establish a systematic method to introduce the Web to clients who have physical disability, are housebound, elderly, or are cognitively impaired. A system was developed which uses a touchscreen and “kiosk type” Web browser to assist in overcoming various physical or cognitive hurdles. It provides an objective tool, the “Awareness and Assessment Protocol” (AAP), which takes the client through graded steps allowing professional documentation of various abilities — fine motor, linguistic, cognitive, and perceptual — while at the same time slowly introducing concepts such clicking on buttons, hypertext and Web navigation. An “Enhanced Web Station” (EWS) provides an interactive tutorial which extends the awareness component, and then allows the client to access and browse the Web from a familiar base. The poster presentation will interactively document the system, and results of the clinical trials using the actual touchscreen interface developed for this project.