So the purpose if this post is to outline what my final year project is, how it will be created and also the concept behind it.

First of all above you will see the project mind map and working flow diagram from which I have worked from to date (click to view original size).

OUTLINE

The driving force behind my project is one of awareness, to make mainly the creators of websites but also the general public aware of the issues that people with a visual disability have with accessing the website. With this in mind the first section of my project is a custom made headset that will, in-effect, give the wearer and experience of having a visual disability and therefore more aware of how someone with that disability would see the world and more importantly see the internet. The hope is that by making someone aware of how these people see is that designers and website creators will change their practices to make sure that these groups of people are also catered for as well as those with full sight.

Below is a visual representation of the how the device will work and how a user may see through the device with a certain disability!

For this part of the project there will hopefully be very little user interface, the hope would be that there would be none and the user of the device would feel as if they were naturally looking through their own eyes just with an impairment. The only interface that may come into it would be one to select the type of disability the device would implement however this piece of the project could be used in a performance art project where the user would wear the device for a set period of time and their eyesight would slowly degrade, this would be slow enough to make the user not realize that their eyesight was getting worse.

The second part of the project, to go with the device would be a custom built web browser where it give the user the ability to chance pieces of a particular website to allow the user to see more clearly, this altered web page would then be stored on a server so when someone else accesses that website they could load the more accessible version of the website and in turn slowly creating a more accessible web. The two things together would enable a designer to be able to create a more accessible page by understanding the disability and changing their website accordingly. The browser will have the ability to change the colors on the site and to also apply filters and overlays to hopefully make a website more visible to all.

 So my final year project and dissertation is aimed at trying to make people more aware about the issues that the visually impaired face when trying to access the internet. This only came to my attention last year on placement how a well designed (I'm talking about design as in the way the code is layed out, not visually) site can instantly change the way a site is 'viewed' by those with am impairment. I believe this topic is very relevant at the moment due to the increasing rise in Rich Internet Applications (RIA's) such as google docs, even facebook to an extent and a lot of the functions within these applications relies on what are known as 'live regions' these are areas of a web page that get updated without the page refreshing and if this is not done correctly with accessibility in mind it can completely block a user from being able to use that part of the site. I believe more needs to be done to highlight this area as large corporations such at Target were even caught out when a law suit was raised against them for their website not providing an accessible way for impaired shoppers to use their website, however Target are to be commended as they have now taken steps to correct this and are working with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) in America to ensure they are leaders in providing an accessible experience to all users.

My final year project is taking this passion to the people who make the decisions, the designers, they are the ones who would not even consider providing a less than perfect experience for full sighted people but this is mostly because designers can not see why a website should be accessible. I hope to rectify this situation by providing an experience to designers which makes them open their eyes to how people with an impairment will see their websites and to provide a way for them to see how small changes can greatly improve the experience to all users. In this vein i was thinking about creating a headset of some sort for a designer to wear and whilst looking at my feeds to day i came across this, it is not that closely related to my project however i thought it was quite a good way if she manages to do have a truly first person view of the world. Her plan is to replace her prosthetic eye with a form of webcam with bluetooth and things in it to transmit what she sees! Check it out, i think it is very cool and in a way on the same lines as what Stelarc's work with the prosthetic ear which he has grown on his forearm which i was lucky enough to see when he gave the kenote speech at an arts festival in Berlin, German 2007.

Stelarc
Monocular

 This has to be one of the biggest problems that I have come across during my time as a student at Plymouth University. The student portal that the university provide is the worst thing in the world. I don't know if its because the developers are too lazy or they just cant be bothered but something that is supposed to make our lives easier in fact makes things twice as difficult and after talking to a couple of my lecturers they completely agree from their side that the system is in now way intuitive and the simplest task can take ages to figure out how. 

However this is not my biggest complaint about the system, THE biggest problem is that there is no way to subscribe to the service, if one of your lecturers posts a new article for the next day there is no way of knowing it is there unless you go to the trouble of logging in, and going through at least 2 links to get to where the thing has been posted and you have to do this process for every module, and then we also have to check our emails to make sure there isn't anything on there. All I'm asking for is a simple system that either ties into the email system or a way to get an RSS feed of a module so i don't have to check all of the folders at least twice a day and heaven forbid if you miss an important announcement for that day because you couldn't be bothered to jump though all the hoops of the system.

A bit of thought and a bit less Microsoft dependance could result in a really good system, I'm sure there are already open source solutions out there! Also please don't presume that everybody uses internet explorer there are a lot, and i mean a lot of people that choose not to be a slave to microsoft and actually use a decent brower. I dont know whether it is this love for IE that has lead to the view i am currently getting or the developers have just decided that the live domain is as gooder test bed as any.

Come on Plymouth, sort it out! You can spend enough on the physical world, now how about making our lives easier in the virtual one!