Unexploited Resources in Interaction Design for Universal Access: People with Impairments as a Resource for Interaction Designers

A challenge to HCI-designers is to create simple, usable, and useful applications. The current paper addresses this problem and presents an innovative possibility to extract useful information from users rarely represented in contemporary participatory design approaches. The study was conducted from a Universal Access point of view. The primary result of the study is that people with well defined intellectual (e.g. understanding and logical reasoning) difficulties provided the designers of web-pages with more valuable and elaborated answers to bottlenecks in the interaction than a more representative group of web-users. With this result in mind Universal Access should not be an unreachable goal. This implies that people with intellectual difficulties can be regarded as an unexploited resource in HCI when using a participatory approach.