Understanding domain expert's perspectives and expectations in assistive technology

Designing computer applications for blind users is a challenging task. The design requirements should encompass those feedback obtained from the target users, the domain experts as well as the designers' intuition of the system. Current practice has placed little emphasis on the involvement of domain experts when capturing the design requirements. This paper addresses this problem by highlighting the importance of such involvement. An interview was conducted to elicit a domain expert's view on how blind users used computer, the technology they used and their general requirements on an ideal system. The findings include blind users require an intelligent system that could read “the right thing” at “the right time”, provide a description of images on a document, and have shortcut keys for the system.