Harvesting Assistive Technology Vocabularies: Methods and Results from a Pilot Study

A terminology gap is one of the leading difficulties faced by consumers and practitioners in selecting assistive technology (AT). As we design and develop a decision support tool for people to discover and choose AT, it is crucial to better understand the language that the users can interpret and prefer to use when referring to and searching for AT. This paper presents a study that aims to harvest vocabulary of people describing access technologies, access needs and difficulties. We describe the method of eliciting user-generated, domain-specific vocabulary; analyze data collected from 44 participants during the pilot phase; and discuss potential use of the vocabulary to improve interface design and product findability.