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“If all products and services could be designed for inclusion, most barriers that physically impaired citizens confront in our society would be overcome.” VICON Consortium 2009

Inspired by this, the challenge of VICON comprises three “How-To” questions:

• Q1 How can consumer-oriented companies adapt their existing product portfolios to the needs of sensory and physically impaired users in a competitive and sustainable manner?
• Q2 How can companies in Europe gain a competitive advantage from adopting inclusive design, related to markets characterized by cheap products from Far East?
• Q3 How can product developers be empowered during product development to consider the real-time accessibility needs of physically impaired users, with the aim of securing universal access to future consumer products?

The needs of people with physical impairments are still not considered sufficiently well when designing user interfaces (UIs) for accessing and interacting with consumer products. Currently available user interfaces and interaction devices rarely fulfil the real-time interaction and accessibility requirements of users suffering from visual, hearing, and dexterity impairments. Thus it is not uncommon for an individual to have multiple impairments, which is particularly common among elderly people. The audience for VICON will be those with mild to moderate age-related impairments (hearing reduction, macular degeneration, etc) rather than profound impairments. They can only fully benefit from consumer products, when UIs incorporate accessible multimodal interaction capabilities providing good usability, and thus possess some degree of context sensitivity. Due to the complexities of singular and multiple age-related impairments, it is unrealistic for a mainstream manufacturer to have a detailed understanding of these and design appropriately. Inclusivity at this level can therefore only come from support from a third party solution to form first party knowledge.