THE PROBLEM
Make a recipe application for visually impaired users.
AUDIENCE
THE INCLUSIVE
KITCHEN
An Application dedicated to facilitating children to interact with each other over science. The initial programs aim was to serve under-represented communities. SE approached me to help with the GUI design of large screen displays that would be installed in schools and churches.
Both visually impaired users an sighted users should be able to use this application. The use of a kitchen designates the age range from 16 years old up.
WHAT IS A VISUALLY IMPAIRED USER?
Visually impaired can mean many things, and while there is no consensus on definition, this application will use the National federation for the blind which is, "The statutory definition of “legally blind” is that central visual acuity must be 20/200 or less in the better eye with the best possible correction or that the visual field must be 20 degrees or less." We will need the application to work with everything from low-vision users to users with complete vision loss.
HOW DO VISUALLY IMPAIRED USERS CURRENTLY COOK?
There are several stores dedicated to selling tools for the visually impaired cook. Most impressive among them is PenFriend2, a voice labeling system. In addition, there are several youtube videos that have instructions specifically for blind people to cook.
INITIAL JOURNEY MAP
This Journey Map helped to solidify several concepts. In this rendition I utilized video for the recipe, but this ended up not being my focus, after researching more I realized that the best way to help the user cook was through a voice system.
WIREFRAME
WIREFRAME
In the wireframe, I took a more voice activation approach. This was largely due to my research, as many of the cooking aids utilized voice.
Watch this movie to see how the wire frame worked.
FINAL PROTOTYPE
There were several issues, once I tested the above wireframe. For one, the contrast would not be appropriate for low-vision users. In addition, I found the system was trying to do too much, and should be scaled back to focus on low-vision users. You'll notice that in the second iteration Black and white are used, almost exclusively. The and the type size is quite large.