Adaptation
Adapting an application to its user, rather than asking the user to adapt to the application. This section carries the practical line of my CISNA work: applications built over an abstract model of themselves, rendered per user by services the application is willing to wait for.
Describing people to computers
Software that adapts to a person has to understand the capacity of the user to interact with it, and the specific capabilities of that user together with any preferences they may have. That description is the part the field has mostly avoided. A companion to my 2009 paper User Capability in an Adaptive World, rebuilt against eighteen worked profiles and surveyed against what else now exists: why a preference is not a capability, what a system actually needs to know, and what the model still cannot say.
Describing what people want
The other half. A capability model says what a person is able to do and says nothing about what they would rather, and conflating the two is how adaptive systems come to be resented. Four kinds of preference, the rules that decide when each applies, and the reason the model advises while the person decides: a cellphone selected by a test subject during my master’s research had neither the largest keys nor the largest text, and I would not have predicted it from the profile I had recorded for them.
Personas, and what they are missing
A persona is an invented person who stands in for a group of users, given a name, a background, a level of skill and a set of goals. They are used across all of user experience work and not only in accessibility: teams design against them, and test against them too, recruiting participants who match one or walking a design through as though that character were the one using it.
There are fundamental objections to the method. A persona is a fiction, so no observation can show it to be wrong, and the more richly it is described the fewer real people it turns out to match. My capability and preference models offer personas a substrate that can be checked against an actual person, and that answers a good deal of what has been objected to.
Accessible Tetris
A case study from my doctoral research, revisited: what it means for Tetris to be accessible. Not a claim of a finished accessible game, but an exploration of design method and interaction modalities, with working examples of techniques, from sonic metaphors and a first-person listening stage to state models whose game clock waits for the user. It closes with the design for a web-based demonstrator built on the spatial audio modern browsers deliver natively.
Where this connects
The theory behind this section lives in Research: the CISNA Model (the five-layer model of accessible adaptive hypermedia these case studies express), and Tetris as accessibility testbed, on why this game in particular earns its keep as a research vehicle.