Universal Design Practices: Development of Accessible Cellular Phones

Cellular phones facilitate many daily communication tasks and have recently become indispensable aids for many users. Since cellular phones are intended to provide access to information and communication services and offer the potential to improve 'quality of life ' for all users, it is desirable to consider universal design when developed. To design cellular phones more user-friendly, Toshiba has been applying user centered design process since 1997. As part of this initiative, studies of cellular phone accessibility for users with disabilities have been conducted in Japan and the United States. And those results are adopted to new products whenever possible. This paper describes the processes of those accessibility studies and some accessibility features such as accessible keypad and audio guidance which supports use of basic functions of cellular phone as latest results of the studies. Those features were adopted to cellular phones newly introduced into the USA market. Also, some general issues to achieve universal design raised through those studies are discussed