Proposals for handling

Proposals For Handling touch based controls

Divide into Categories (Rob Nerhood)

1. Mechanical
2. Touch sensitive
3. Touch dependent (biometric)

Mechanical controls may not be the best alternative to a touch sensitive control - language should be drafted to allow alternatives

Touch screen versus touch sensitive:

• touch screen more of a biometric technology
• touch sensitive is still a "mechanically" driven solution but there

is greater control of the sensitivity and timing characteristics. The example give was adaptive controls on a microwave

Potential touch sensitive characteristics:

• Control must be tactilely discernible
• Control must have a mechanism to minimize accidental activation due

to touch

• Control characteristics, such as time to registration of signal,

pressure, etc., should be adjustable

Potential touch screen content:

• An alternative method to achieve touch screen control functions must

be provided via an alternative format or interact (for example voice control).

Alternate sorting (Gregg Van)

PROBLEMS By touch -biometric - I think we were talking about 'capacitive' screens that required a connection to the human body. I'm not sure we should call those biometric since biometric is mostly related to ID.

And touch screens that are not capacitive are in fact almost all mechanical - it is just at a very small scale and involves flexible conductors.

if we need to sort maybe:

1. . Human contact controls (capacitive and heat sensitive)
2. . Light touch controls (if you add "mechanical" it would exclude 'human touch controls' but then confuses people who can't think of a touchscreen as being mechanical)
3. . Other Physical controls.

(3 can't be titled "mechanical' or it would include #2)

Just Say What controls should do or not do (don't try to categorize the future)

BEST IF WE DON'T TRY TO SORT ? JUST SET REQUIREMENTS Perhaps we can't easily sort these.

So we should just have

1. a rule about Human Touch (that you need a non-human touch control as well)
2. a rule about any light touch (that you need a method for doing same thing that is 'tactilely discernable without activation"
3. the rules for other physical

Or perhaps we put them all together into one provision.

1. all functionality must be operable from controls which
   • are tactilely discernable without activation
   • do not require contact or connection with human body parts
   • do not require more than XXX pressure
   • do not require simultaneous actions
   • do not require pinching, twisting of the wrist or tight grasping (per clarification from Access Board)
   • (others provisions if I missed one)

Then all we need to say is that you have to be able to tactilely find the controls (above) without encountering touch activated controls that a person would not know were there .

This would allow touch screens, touch controls etc as long as there were OTHER ways of doing things and the touch controls weren't intermixed with the physical controls or something where the person couldn't use the physical controls without activating the 'tactilely invisible' touch controls.

We also need to keep "SoftKeys" in mind. You can find the key but you have no idea what it's meaning at any point in time is.