Redesign the mouse for the disabled

Due to the needs of remote classes, my most frequent interaction recently is to use my mouse. When thinking about how to provide a better mouse experience for people with various disabilities, I think that for those with hearing impairment, traditional mouse use does not affect their ability to operate. For blind people, unfortunately, even if they can touch and use the mouse, they cannot see the feedback output on the screen. Therefore, I mainly considered designing a head-mounted mouse for those who have no visual impairment but have hand disabilities or cannot use their limbs for special reasons.

The core part of this hat mouse is the gravity sensor, and the user can simulate the operation of the mouse by moving the head. Tilting your head to the left and returning to the original position is equivalent to a left-click. In the same way, tilting your head to the right is equivalent to right-clicking. The virtual “scroll wheel” that controls sliding up and down of the page is operated by raising and lowering the head.

When I paid special attention to the accessibility of people with disabilities, I realized that some people are limited by their inability to perform delicate operations with their hands, which makes them lose many opportunities to use electronic products, especially touch-screen products. But if we provide a display screen controlled by a head-mounted mouse for them, they can still perform many basic operations, such as browsing the websites, watching videos, and so on. And if they need to input text, they can choose voice input to avoid manual operation.

When we face people with disabilities with different difficulties, our product design will also become very different. By caring about and meeting the needs of these users, more and more barrier-free design substitutes can enter people’s lives, so everyone will be able to use more products.