In this column, I always try to discuss papers that have recently been published, but this time I want to discuss a paper that was published 22 years ago. I wanted to discover early papers published on accessibility in the ACM DL so I searched for the term "accessibility" and received 4,651 results. When I sorted these by date, the paper entitled "A User Interface for Deaf-Blind People (Preliminary Report)" by Richard Ladner, Randy Day, Dennis Gentry, Karin Meyer and Scott Rose appeared to be one of the earliest papers published on accessibility. It is definitely an interesting paper and I always think we have a lot to learn from the papers like this one.

A user interface for deaf-blind people (preliminary report)

A user interface suitable for deaf-blind users is presented and justified. The interface is designed for small paperless Braille displays, large font visual displays, or other low-bandwidth displays. Some of the key properties of the interface are that it uses a hierarchical approach to structure both commands and data, has a small universal command set, and has pervasive editing capability. DBNet, a system employing the user interface, has been built and tested with deaf-blind users. DBNet will provide various communication services to the deaf-blind community including electronic news, mail, and bulletin boards.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1165387.30864
Full Proceedings: ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, Volume 18, Issue 4 (April 1987), pages 81-92, 1987.

Labels: deaf-blind, user interface