Prof. Simeon Keates (short bio)
School of Engineering, University of Greenwich, United Kingdom
Sunday, 22 June 2014, 14:00 - 17:30
The objective of this tutorial is to introduce and explore both user-centered design and universal access and to show how they can be implemented successfully in corporate and research environments to deliver genuinely accessible and usable products and services. This tutorial will explore both the theory and its application, examining how real world constraints require the adaptation of theory to meet each new context of use.
This tutorial will cover the basics and introduce more advanced aspects of both user-centered design and universal access. We will explore how they are fundamentally related and also their application in real-world situations.
It is widely accepted in principle that both user-centered design and universal access are essential for the development of products that are both usable and accessible by the widest possible range of users. However, neither has achieved ubiquity in industrial practice. There are many reasons for this - technological, organisational and cultural. In this tutorial we will examine these barriers to adoption, where they come from and how they can be overcome.
We will look at how user-centered design and universal access have been successfully implemented in typical design management processes, with a minimum of modifications to existing design practice. Significant advances in overall usability and accessibility can be readily achieved and this tutorial will be illustrated by numerous case studies where this has happened. You will see how some companies and organisations have risen to this challenge and how others have failed. By examining from their experiences, you will learn to identify and avoid the common reasons for failure. This also gives a great opportunity for researchers new to the field to learn how real-world experiences often differ from the theoretical approaches taught in the classroom.
In particular, we will examine the role of the whole supply ecosystem in the delivery of products and services – an aspect that is often overlooked by many universal access practitioners.
The case studies will include the design and evaluation of both hardware and software, including kiosks, robots, websites and the next generation of television and broadcast media.
The tutorial is designed for anyone with an interest in universal access and accessibility, from academic researchers to practitioners attempting to develop accessible solutions.
Professor Simeon Keates is Dean of the School of Engineering at the University of Greenwich. He was formerly Chair of HCI and Head of School of Engineering, Computing and Applied Mathematics at the University of Abertay Dundee and Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, where he lectured in the Design and Digital Communication study line. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he also worked as an Industrial Research Fellow in the Engineering Design Centre.
After leaving Cambridge, he moved to the US and joined the Accessibility Research Group at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center before moving to Boston and working at ITA Software (now part of Google) as a Usability Lead designing interfaces for Air Canada.
Simeon also has an extensive history of consultancy, with clients including Royal Mail, the US Social Security Administration, the UK Department of Trade and Industry, Danish Broadcasting Corporation (Danske Radio) and Lockheed Martin.