Designing Computer Interface for Physically Challenged Persons

Persons with severe motion impairment like biplegics, quadriplegics etc. face difficulty in accessing computer- based systems since they can not use conventional computer access devices like mouse or keyboards. Alternate access mechanisms consisting of scanning and access switches have been developed for such users. One problem with scanning based access mechanism is that it slows down the user-computer interaction significantly leading to user frustration and fatigue that in turn results in further drop in user performance. To address this issue, this paper presents a scanning mechanism that adapts itself according to the user´s requirements. This adaptation leads to an improvement in user performance. The performance improvement of the proposed adaptive scanning mechanism is demonstrated in the paper with user testing results.