Multimodal interaction with mobile applications

Mobility represents a key factor for social inclusion. People with disabilities need help when moving in an physical environment. Mobile applications can improve their mobility by supporting the process of finding, using and accessing information in and about their physical environment. These applications however are permanently affected by changing conditions as environmental attributes, the users´ tasks and abilities. Therefore the user interface needs to be adapted to those conditions to meet the accessibility requirements, i. e. using various modalities in different situations. Today most developers of mobile applications do not take these constraints into account appropriately. One reason for this dilemma is, that accessibility is considered only at the end of the software engineering process, rather than deploying accessibility at all stages of the development. This paper focuses on a framework which supports developers to create accessible mobile applications by taking the mobile context, personal attributes and the user´s tasks into account.