Introduction

This one day workshop organised by COST Action 294 seeks to bring together broadcasters, industrial service designers and academics who are concerned about making Interactive Television (iTV) inclusive and accessible to all citizens.

Through short presentations and group discussions this workshop aims to creatively establish an agenda for putting the 'inclusive design of iTV' at the forefront of research innovation.

The workshop will be held on July 2, 2008 at EuroITV 2008 in Salzburg, Austria.

Description of topic

As many countries prepare for a ‘digital switchover’, the ‘inclusiveness’ of the emerging technologies seems virtually absent. Currently, there is little commitment from industry to make iTV services more accessible/useable across the wide spectrum of users. Current design methods tend to target a notional ‘average’ user, but an increasingly significant segment of the population does not fit this description. A different perspective is needed on the wide diversity of abilities across the population and how they can be addressed with design. 

As with every technological advance, user groups on the margins (e.g. older adults) are in danger of being further marginalised, due to the overwhelming focus on mainstream audiences. This is partly due to commercial expediency, but also due to a tendency for designers to work with a mental model of the ‘average user’ as the target group.

Despite such limitations, iTV has both a clear imperative for ‘design-for-all’, and a chance to use ‘design-for-all’ as a mission that motivates exploration and innovation. As such, a whole range of users have much to gain from, and contribute to, the next generation of digital products and services.

The opportunity is that the vast spectrum of needs and desires represented by the population of ‘non-average’ users affords the discovery of pioneering solutions at the leading-edge, which may also prove to be a better fit for many other (almost-but-not-quite) ‘average’ users. Innovation and diversity in; the design of input devices, greater tailorability in content delivery, greater user involvement in the creation and selection of content, and in all aspects of ‘interface design’, all represent this leading edge. Rather than condense design targets down to ‘typical’ users, the agenda is to explore the design space of possible solutions for the wider heterogeneous population.

This implies the need for novel strategies in research and design that facilitate exploration of the whole user population, of the physical, psychological and social landscape, of the evolving leisure, entertainment and domestic contexts and of technology (device) and service (infrastructure) designs.

In consideration of the above, this workshop seeks to set out an agenda for putting universal usability and accessibility in the forefront of iTV research innovation.