Dev:UI

From FOSSWiki

Why an Accessible Interface?

Disaster management involves people from many countries and organizations, with diverse needs. Resources for development and deployment of a system are limited. So the system design must meed the needs of as many people as possible with a minimum of changes. A demonstration redesign of the Sahana home page, by Tom Worthington is available at <http://www.tomw.net.au/2005/wd/sahana.html>

The most visible part of the system is the user interface: the screens of information and keyboard or mouse clicks entered. Accessible design techniques guide a design which will be available for use by the widest range of people and the equipment they will be using.

Standards such as the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines <http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/> help design interfaces for people with limited language skills and also using limited computer and telecommunications equipment. The interface can be designed to conform to Conformance Level "Triple-A" of the W3C guidelines.

User Interface for Mobile Operation

The system needs to be available in the field though portable terminals (e.g. PDAs, mobile phones, satellite phone). Careful design of the user interface will assist this. The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines provide design advice for limited computer devices and bandwidth.

Testing the User Interface

Services such as Watchfire's WebXACT <http://webxact.watchfire.com/> provide free services for testing a user interface for quality, efficiency and accessibility. --Tomw 21:12, 3 Aug 2005 (EDT)