A Physical User Interface Description language for Interface Digital Twins

Abstract

Recent studies demonstrated that the user interfaces of many physical products lack accessibility to individuals with disabilities, with specific regard to individuals who are blind or suffer from cognitive conditions. Nevertheless, in the last decades, the introduction of User Interface Description languages (UIDLs) in the software industry has provided designers and developers with a set of standard protocols for formalizing the components of the User Interface (UI) of applications and websites and for specifying their properties. This, in turn, has resulted in best practices that enable more rapid development of accessible UIs. In our previous work, we introduced the concept of Interface Digital Twins (IDTs), that is, augmented digital replicas of the user interfaces of physical devices. In this paper, we present a UIDL specifically designed for improving the accessibility of physical products: we detail the language, highlight its advantages, and discuss its application in the context of IDTs.