Human Computer Interaction

Accessibility

This guide helps you get your bearings in Accessibility before you start exploring the interactive timeline, framework graph, and concept maps.

Before You Dive In

Accessibility examines how people and computational systems co-produce action, meaning, and experience.
Rough timeline: human factors and usability engineering -> cognitive and task-analytic models -> participatory and CSCW traditions -> critical, embodied, and inclusive HCI.
Start with the shift from user-as-operator to user-as-participant; it changed methods and ethics across the field.
In Noosaga, compare frameworks by evaluation lens: efficiency, learnability, accessibility, social impact, or value alignment.

UsabilityEffectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which users achieve goals.

AffordancePerceived action possibilities offered by an interface or artifact.

Participatory designDesign approach involving affected users as co-designers.

CSCWComputer-supported cooperative work; study and design of collaborative technologies.

AccessibilityDesign practices ensuring interaction for users with diverse abilities and contexts.

Reducing HCI to UI polish rather than socio-technical system design.

Assuming usability testing alone captures long-term social effects.

Treating accessibility as edge-case support instead of core quality criterion.

Open the interactive view and scan the framework timeline. Which frameworks came first? Which ones overlap? Where are the big transitions?

Click into individual frameworks to read what each one claims, where it came from, and how it relates to its neighbors.

See how the key ideas within a framework connect. This is useful for figuring out what to learn first and what depends on what.

Take the quiz for any framework you've read about. It's a quick way to find out whether you actually understood the core ideas or just skimmed them.