Evaluating Accessible Synchronous CMC Applications

This paper proposes a more general evaluation methodology to measure the usability and user experience qualities of accessible synchronous computer-mediated communication applications. The proposed methodology goes beyond current practices by evaluating how the interaction between a user and a product influences the user experience of those at the other endpoint of the communication. Another contribution of the paper is the proposal of a user test where one of the participants tries to guess whether the other participant has a disability or not. An argument is made suggesting that the ultimate goal when designing real-time communication applications is to design mechanisms that can hide the disabilities of users, so that participants involved in the communication do not perceive the disabilities of each other. The proposed ideas are tested and validated with two examples of synchronous communica- tion applications.