ENHANCING INTERNET ACCESS FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

The EIA project was funded by the ''Online Public Access Initiative'', a federal initiative of the Australian Department of Communications a nd the Arts. The project was designed to establish a systematic method to introduce the Web to clients who have physical disability, are hou sebound, elderly, or an cognitively impaired. A system was developed w hich uses a touchscreen and ''kiosk type'' Web browser to assist in ov ercoming various physical or cognitive hurdles. It provides an objecti ve tool, the Awareness and Assessment Protocol'' (AAP); which takes th e client through graded steps allowing professional documentation of v arious abilities - fine motor, linguistic, cognitive, and perceptual - while at the same time slowly introducing concepts such clicking on b uttons, hypertext and Web navigation. An ''Enhanced Web Station'' (EWS ) provides an interactive tutorial which extends the awareness compone nt, and then allows the client to access and browse the Web from a fam iliar base. The poster presentation will interactively document the sy stem, and results of the clinical trials using the actual touchscreen interface developed for this project. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier S cience B.V. All rights reserved.