Design - notes from ROM trip

[Alison Benjamin]

Hi,

Added a page to the wiki that chronicles our recent trip to the ROM,  
which has some info about the physical and interaction designs.
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=11771465

(It is linked to from the "Preliminary research page" on the wiki)

A quick thought about my current thinking about kiosk accessibility. I  
think I expressed this in a design meeting today, but I am in a  
reflective mood:

I'm imagining that while we seek a compelling use case for the kiosk,  
that this is a lesser worry, in the sense that there are guidelines/  
standards/ best practices we can follow to guide our design and that  
will help us provide affordances that make it easy to use for more  
people. One thing that means is providing information and operability  
in redundant ways, i.e. you can receive info through an audio channel,  
or if it contains video it is captioned, if there's a touch screen,  
there's also a way to use it with buttons, or there's some affordances  
for audio or speakers. The ROM kiosks had some of this functionality  
to a point, e.g. they made use of sound from speakers and yet the  
kiosks themselves were very unobtrusive.

The analogy I would draw would be to how Fluid Infusion components  
were designed. That is, they are keyboard navigatable (which makes  
them more AT-friendly) but in my experience as a "mouse using", non-AT  
user I don't even notice that feature. No one's experience will be  
detracted from.

As James indicates in his notes from the ROM a key problem there was  
lack of redundancy of operability and information communicated (http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Notes+from+chat+with+blind+user+about+museum+experience+%28January+13%2C+2010%29 
)

So I guess in conclusion it's the use case that is stumping me and I  
look forward to fleshing out some more ideas. I really hope I can be  
helpful with that and other parts of the design. I am excited to be  
back thinking about the DIA.

Thanks guys
Alison