Assistive Technology

 

‘The Digital’ is great for designing interactive Assistive Technologies. These are devices or applications that support us in fulfilling certain tasks that we could not accomplish otherwise. For example, screen readers enable people with severe visual impairments to consume newspaper articles or other textual information on their computers via text-to-speech translation.

Many of my prototypes can be considered as Assistive Technologies. This applies to examples from the Digital Design blog, too. Also, in my teaching, students regularly explore Digital Design in the realm of Assistive Technologies. Hence, examples of such technologies can be found there. Still, I present an additional dedicated Assistive Technology blog here. The aim of the research collated in this dedicated blog is to explore one specific type of Assistive Technology: I am interested in novel concepts that enable users to (re-)configure their Assistive Technology to serve their own ends on their own. For example, a set of computer bricks that can be assembled into a customized accessible computer.