Thoughts on day one of the The 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. I’m not normally a cup-half-full kind of a guy, but the end of the first day of a good conference always produces a certain melancholia at the realisation that soon, these interesting academic conversations will be done. ASSETS 2011 produces just such a feeling because the quality of the first day has been excellent. The two most important sessions for me were the Keynote and the first session on Assistive Technology Design Paradigms.

My final week discussing Dix 2010 [1] which I covered last week, and the week before that too. Now lets: imagine you have a group of children and want to give them lunch. In the UK you might well choose baked beans. Not the most exciting choice, but few children actively dislike baked beans; they are acceptable to everyone. However, give each of those children a euro (or maybe two) in a sweet shop … they will all come away with a different chocolate bar, the chocolate bar that is ‘OK’ for everyone gets chosen by none.

What I hear you cry, “single user studies can’t be valid, even ethnography’s have more than one user”. Well that’s what I was saying before reading Dix 2010 [1] which I covered last week. The critical thing that Dix sees as different is that - and I’m paraphrasing and using my own terms here - single user studies can be used to scope extent as opposed to our normal desire to support a point via a measure of magnitude of similarity across users; as a way of discovering out-layers as opposed to those which look like harmonise sample data; and as a way of disproving the rule which all the other sample data seems to support.

One of my ‘A History of HCI in 15 Papers’* The January 2010 issue of Interacting with Computers (Volume 22 Issue 1 / http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intcom.2009.11.005) is a Festschrift Special Issue for John Long. This is a special issue dedicated to John because, as the editors (Alistair Sutcliffe and Ann Blandford) say: John Long is one of the founders of our discipline in the UK and contributed significantly to the emergence of HCI in the international arena.