Universal usability
David Novick, Jean C. Scholtz · Interacting with Computers · 2002
Universal Usability will be met when affordable, useful, and usable technology accommodates the vast majority of the global population: this entails addressing challenges of technology variety, user diversity, and gaps in user knowledge in ways only beginning to be acknowledged by educational, corporate, and government agencies. (Ben Shneiderman, Communications of the ACM, 2000). Universal usability serves as both an ideal and a research agenda. Users, in their variety of characteristics and contexts, face a corresponding variety of barriers and impediments to the use of interfaces. These variations include age, location, culture, education, range of cognitive and physical abilities, and economic status. Problems with interfaces that many might find trivial can, for others, present significant issues of usability. As more information becomes available (and eventually available only) on-line, as e-government and e-commerce increase in importance, and as our lives become increasingly information-centered, these issues become correspondingly critical. Researchers in the field of human-computer interaction are now addressing this functional aspect of the digital divide.