Automatically Generating Custom User Interfaces for Users With Physical Disabilities

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for desktop applications are typically optimized for ``average'' users who interact with computers via keyboard, mouse and a small range of display sizes. Part of the reason why some users with vision or motor impairments find it hard to use computers is not their inherent inability to use computers effectively but the mismatch between those users' individual needs and the designers' assumptions.

We argue that a flexible automatic UI generation can help provide disabled users with custom-tailored user interfaces that optimally take advantage of these users' abilities -- a task that cannot be accomplished by human designers due to the idiosyncratic nature of many disabilities. We have built SUPPLE to automatically generate custom UIs and we are also building a system that allows non-experts to easily reparametrize the UI generator for the needs of individual users, thus making our solution scalable.