Abstract
From its foundation in 1985, the Egokituz Laboratory of HCI for Special needs has researched the application of diverse HCI methodologies and technologies to enhance the inclusion and digital accessibility of people with diverse types of disabilities. Over this time we have discovered that the human side of the HCI requires specific attention that technology oriented people -that’s us- are not always qualified to provide. In this talk, I will review some mistakes that I hope we have learned from. I will also present our approaches to overcoming these mistakes.
If you shut the door to all errors, truth will be shut out.
Rabindranath Tagore
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Notes
- 1.
After giving this talk, I had the pleasure of having dinner with Professor Larry Constantine. He had spent my entire presentation taking pictures of my slides with a huge telephoto lens, and at the end of the session he asked several questions, so I was a bit concerned about his opinion. At the dinner, he told me that the pictures were for his wife who was in the United States. “I hope she enjoys your talk as much as I did”. Evidently, his friendly words relaxed me a lot.
- 2.
TIDE Programme: Technology for the Integration of Disabled and Elderly People.
- 3.
Collins Concise English Dictionary © HarperCollins Publishers
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Acknowledgments
The author is the head of the EGOKITUZ/ADIAN research team, supported by the Basque Government, Department of Education, Universities and Research under grant IT980-16, and participates in the PhysCom project, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Fund (grant TIN2017-85409-P).
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Abascal, J. (2021). Learning from Errors Designing Assistive Technology. In: Escalona, M.J., Ramirez, A.J., Silva, H.P., Constantine, L., Helfert, M., Holzinger, A. (eds) Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications. CHIRA CHIRA 2018 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1351. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67108-2_2
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