Towards an Environment that Supports Internet Designers to Design for All Panayiotis Koutsabasis 1 , Jenny S. Darzentas 1 , Thomas Spyrou 1 , Carlos Velasco-Nunez 2 , Yehya Mohamad 2 , John Darzentas 1 1 University of the Aegean, Department of Product and Systems Design, Ermoupolis, Syros, Greece. {kgp, jennyd, tsp, idarz} @aegean.gr 2 GMD FIT.HCI (Institute for Applied Information Technology - Department of Human-Computer Interac- tion), Schloss Birlinghoven Campus, Germany. {Carlos.Velasco-Nunez, yehya.mohamad} @gmd.de SUMMARY Over the last few years, work on recomendations, methods, and tools for ‘Design for All’ (DfA) has increased awareness regarding the incorporation of requirements of people with special needs into sys- tems designs. However the extent and impact of this work in Internet-based services has not yet been widely seen. A large part of recommendations for Internet-based services has been developed quite recently and thus has not been widely taken up in design and development. Furthermore, most of this work has not been provided to designers and IT in- dustry in forms that can enable them to easily in- clude it within the design process. IST project IRIS is a recently started project, which aims to design an architecture and develop an environment which will aid designers to design for all. IRIS argues that breadth of design-for-all recomendations, tools and methods needs to be presented to designers in a manner that can easily be integrated with the design process. KEYWORDS: Design for all, universal design, de- sign support, accessibilty, recomendations, archi- tecture. INTRODUCTION The wide scale participation of all citizens, includ- ing those with special needs or impairments, in in- formation society systems and services depends heavily on the provision of generic, multi-modal, highly adaptive and personalised means of access. This is especially true for Internet-based systems and services, which have gained much prominence in the last few years in various human activities such as work, education, leisure and commerce. From the perspective of the Information Technol- ogy (IT) professional, the process of designing and developing for an inclusive information society re- quires awareness and to-the-point guidance with re- spect to these design-for-all tools. Unfortunately designers are not usually well guided with regard to the deployment of such tools and fail to identify their suitability [5][12]. As a result, most of service designs address average persons’ needs. However, as identified at the recent GEN/ISSS Open Meeting on Design for All and Assistive Technology, ‘few people represent the average person, with the con- sequence that if a product is designed for the ave r- age person, it might be uncomfortable or impossi- ble for most people to use it’ [4]. In order to provide to the point guidance to design- ers of Internet services regarding ‘Design for All’ (DfA) recommendations, methods and tools, there is a need for a purposeful synthesis and elaboration of various strands of related work into a format that can be easily applied into the Internet service design process. This paper briefly illustrates the breadth of DfA recommendations, methods and tools and dis- cusses issues related to their direct applicability by designers of Internet-based services. It proposes an approach for the elaboration of this work into a DfA support environment that can be used by deasigners of Internet-based services and presents the basic functions of this environment. THE BREADTH OF DFA RECOMENDATIONS The term ‘Design for All’ has been widely used in a number of contexts. As summarised in [8], the terms ‘Universal Design’ and ‘Design for All’ have been used interchangeably and ‘for some individu- als, they are considered as new politically correct terms, referring to efforts intended to introduce “special features” for “special users” during the de- sign of a product. To others, they are deeply mean- ingful and rich topics that elevate what designers like to call “good user-based design” to a more en- compassing concept of addressing the needs of all potential users’. Despite the fact that there might be dangers lurking when examining concepts, methods, tools, tech- niques etc. under such a generic spectrum, the latter consideration entails an inclusive approach towards product and systems design and is especially appro- priate for the work described in this paper. This gen- eral perspective requires that a wide range of