Digital television for all: A report on accessibility and inclusive design. Appendix E - Investigating the inclusivity of digital television set-top box receivers

This report contains a summary of work carried out by the Inclusive Design team at the University of Cambridge on behalf of The Generics Group. It describes the team?s audit of digital television (DTV) equipment with regard to its accessibility. The aim of this study was to investigate the accessibility of DTV technology, focussing on the current generation of set-top boxes (STB) which provide ?free to view? services. Specifically, the objective of the study was to identify specific causes of concern with regard to user interaction with DTV that might lead to exclusion, i.e. situations where users may be unable to use the new technology. In particular, the team was keen to identify challenges presented to users by DTV that are not found when using the current analogue equivalent. The number of STBs is increasing rapidly. Hence, for the purposes of this study, efforts were focused on looking at three set-top boxes selected by The Generics Group to be representative of the systems currently available. These will be referred to throughout the report as STB1, STB2 and STB3. STB1 was selected because it was being marketed as ?easy to use?; STB2 was chosen because it was the market leader at the time; and STB3 represents a non-DTT (Digital Terrestrial Television) service. Note: the assessments described in this report were performed over the period April to June, 2003, and thus all comments expressed within this report are derived from the services available during that time period. With the continually evolving nature of DTV, some of the interaction details will have changed by the time that this report is published