Article

Survey of User Needs for ICT -- Community Living by People with Disabilities

This report summarizes data from the Survey of User Needs for Information and Communication Technology (SUN-ICT) conducted by the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center for Community Living, Health and Function (LiveWell RERC). This survey is part of the authors' long-standing research program to track the use, usability and user needs of people with disabilities for mainstream consumer information and communication technologies. This survey is also the cornerstone of a larger research undertaking based on the Concerns Report Method (CRM), which assesses the relative importance of functional activities by people across disabilities (Fawcett et al. 1987). The CRM has been used extensively with different consumer groups to identify strengths and specific needs in various community contexts. We present two related lines of analysis: 1) an inventory of current technology used by people with disabilities; and 2) an exploration of the types of daily activities that people with disabilities would like to engage in, but experience some difficulty. This analysis provides: 1) a snapshot of where people with disabilities are in terms of ICT adoption, and 2) the challenges to independence and community participation they continue to face which ICT may be able to ameliorate.

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