Principles and strategies for practitioners
designing universally usable sites

Users with Disabilities

Blind and low vision users

Color vision confusion

Cognitively disabled

Deaf & hearing impaired

Mobility impaired

Special User Groups

Children

Elderly

Users with low education, low motivation

Users of other languages than English

Users from other cultures than the US

Cross language information retrieval

Technology

Users with slow connections

Users with screens less than 640 x 480

Telephone based access to the web (WAP)

Telephone based access to the web (speech recognition)

Textual equivalents for audio/video representations of content

Tutorial methods

Designs to help novice web users

Online help design, email help methods and customer service guidelines

The goal of universal usability is to enable the widest range of users to benefit from web services. This website contains recommendations and information resources for web developers who wish to accommodate users with slow modems, small screens, text-only, and wireless devices. It deals with content design issues such as translation to other languages, plus access for novice, low educated and low motivated users, children and elders. The website also covers design guidance for blind, deaf, cognitively impaired, and physically disabled users. Each article has practical guidelines, web site examples, links to organizations, and a bibliography. For related information see www.universalusability.org and the information from the ACM Conference on Universal Usability (November 2000). 
This website is a class project for Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (Computer Science 838S) ( Spring of 2001). It is a continuation of the UUGuide project started by graduate students in the Spring 2000 class. The courses were led by Prof. Ben Shneiderman Founding Director of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab.