Universal Design Principles in Graphical User Interface: Understanding Visual Ergonomics for the Left-Handed Users in the Right-Handed World

Abstract

The advent of graphical user interface in computers has helped users to easily access its features, thereby become familiar with the computer environment quickly and enhance the overall performance of the system. As the GUI evolved, the accessibility options of the user interfaces were expanded to cater benchmark users or extreme users. However, whether the accessibility options provided by operating system manufacturers are discoverable or readily available to the users is a questionable affair. One solution to this problem could be designing the interface in such a manner which could be universally acceptable and usable by all user categories. Although this option seems practically impossible since different user categories may have different needs, the user base of the particular GUI could be maximized. This paper intends to study the accessibility options provided in a computer interface by critically analyzing the problem faced/likely to occur to the users with the objective to come up with design solutions to expand the user base of the existing operating system.