GOODMAN-DEANE, J. ... et al, 2011. Estimating exclusion: a tool to help designers. IN: Proceedings of Include 2011, Royal College of Art, 18-20 April 2011.
An exclusion audit assesses how inclusive a product or service is. This is useful for
comparing designs and identifying points for improvement. In an exclusion audit, the
designer or usability expert identifies the demands a product places on the user‟s
capabilities and enters these into an exclusion calculator. This software then estimates
the proportion of the adult British population who would be excluded from using the
product because their capabilities do not meet these demands.
This paper describes research on improving the exclusion calculator based on a
recent reanalysis of the calculator‟s underlying dataset. This enabled the capabilities to
be broken down into more specific sub-categories or “demand types”. An experiment
investigated the use of these demand types in the context of an exclusion audit. It found
that participants could determine the demand type of an action consistently, in the
majority of cases. This approach was adopted in a redesign of the calculator, described
in this paper.