Stephen Hawking used something called a switch to communicate, author books and surf the web. Just like Stephen, millions of people around the world with motor impairments use switches to access technology. Sadly, the awareness and knowledge about this assistive technology is generally low. So it’s time to switch the spotlight on switch users!

The author Hampus looking suspiciously at a red, round button in his hand

Short note before we start: This article was first written for the great initiative 24 Accessibility – an accessibility article each day in December before Christmas.

Switches can look very different, but in the image above I’m holding a classic one – basically, a big button that you press to navigate your computer, smartphone or tablet.

I’m an accessibility nerd. I organize accessibility meetups, run a company focused on accessibility (Axess Lab), can recite the accessibility guidelines in my sleep and own 6 different accessibility T-shirts. But even though I live and breathe accessibility, I realize I have a very limited knowledge about switches.

I know way more about screen readers than I do about switches. When you think about it, that’s really strange. Looking at pure numbers, there are far more people around the world who have motor impairments like Cerebral Palsy, ALS and Parkinson’s disease than who are blind.

So why do we hear and read so little about switch accessibility? I don’t know! But whatever the reason, I feel it’s time to switch it up! Time to learn more about this assistive technology and what we as developers and designers can do to make our technology switch accessible.

So I used a switch control for a day and I’d like to share the insights it gave me with you!

My setup

I used a classic type of switch, basically a big colored button. It’s the one I’m looking suspiciously at in the first image of this article. This type of switch can be placed in the users’ hands, by their head, elbows, feet or wherever they feel most comfortable with it. I held my switch in my hands.

I should mention that there are many other types of switches:

Sip-and-puff switches. They are “clicked” by sipping and puffing into a straw-like-component.
Sensory switches. Stephen Hawking had a sensor attached to his cheek that he activated by a small movement with his cheek up or down.
Camera switches. On iOS products, you can activate a switch by tilting your head to the side.

There are many other variations of switches, but they all work similarly to the original button-switch, so I used a button.

It should also be mentioned that I used a single switch. You can set up multiple switches for different actions – for instance, you could assign one to take you to the home screen, one to move the cursor forward (like pressing the tab-key on a keyboard) and one to click.

However, it is possible to use a single switch to fully interact with technology. Which I think is pretty cool so I wanted to try that! Also, I know of people who use a single-switch-setup, for instance, the YouTuber Christopher Hills, whose channel I strongly recommend you check out.

I used the built-in setting Switch Control in iOS products — on an iPhone 7, MacBook and Apple TV. It is, of course, possible to use switches on a PC or Android device, but I felt it would be enough of a challenge for me to try it out on one operating system this time.

Insights

Let me share the insights I got from my day of switch usage with you.

Technology is awesome

Even though I experienced a few obstacles along the way which I’ll go through below, the main thing that stuck with me is how awesome this technology is. All you need is control of a tiny part of your body so you can activate a switch, and suddenly the whole world opens up through technology. You can surf online, pay bills, order pizza, communicate with friends and unlock doors, all through a single switch.

Imagine the difference in independence and quality of life this means for people with severe motor impairments living today compared to — say — 40 years ago.

Even though the technology is awesome, there are still things that could improve a lot to give a more equal access and experience of technology out there.

Typing is slow

Typing with switch control is much, much slower than I’m used to. Here’s a video where I type “Hello World.” If you don’t want to watch the video I describe what happens in it in the text below the video player.

Video description: A focus indicator jumps across the keyboard and you need to wait until it’s at the letter you want to type. It takes me over a minute to write “Hello World.”

After having practiced a fair bit with typing, I measured how quickly I could type a happy birthday text to my mom. As a comparison, I first typed it with my fingers like I normally do, then a second time with switch control activated. The message was 18 words long. Here’s the result:

Without switch control: 43 seconds
With switch control: 8 mins 52 seconds (or 532 seconds)

So it took me over 12 times as long to type with switch control activated, even though I made very few mistakes and used word suggestions as often as possible.

Calculating my typing speed, I was able to type just over 2 words per minute. 2.2 to be exact. As a reference, this article is around 2700 words long, so at 2.2 words per minute, it would take me 20 hours 27 minutes to write it.

I asked a colleague of mine to try out typing as well. She had not had the same amount of practice and was able to type at about half my speed, around 1 word per minute.

These speeds are in line with sources on Stephen Hawking’s typing speed, which state Hawking could type around 1 word per minute before adding word predictions which doubled his speed.

The slow typing speed came with a couple of insights for me:

Word predictions when typing is super useful. But word prediction could improve a lot. For instance, I wrote “switch control” twice in one sentence, but my onscreen keyboard didn’t suggest it to me any quicker the second time around.
Autocomplete in search fields is very helpful.
Time limits – getting kicked out of a form if you don’t complete it in a set amount of time – is a severe accessibility barrier.
Forms that prefill automatically save tons of time and energy.
Dictation — speaking your message — would make typing much quicker. However, many people with motor impairments also have a speech impairment that makes dictation impossible. So I decided not to use dictation in my one-day-experiment.

Scrolling is sometimes painfully slow

I think everyone would agree that scrolling is something you do quite often, especially on smaller devices like smartphones.

So it surprised me that it was painfully slow to scroll on an iPhone. Let me break down what switch users have to do to scroll:

2 quick clicks to bring up an interaction menu
1 click to select the row with scroll button
1 click to select the scroll button
1 click to select the row with scroll down button
1 click to select the scroll down button
1 click to go back to the main menu
1 click to close the interaction menu

So in total 8 clicks to scroll down. Here’s a short video that shows the interaction described above when I scroll on Twitter.

Video description: Scrolling one screen on Twitter with switch control. 20 seconds was needed to bring up, navigate and close the interaction menu.

On Android, the scroll gesture seems to be much more effective, as illustrated in this YouTube clip: A11ycast with Rob Dodson – Switch Device (Youtube). Here it just takes two clicks to scroll: one when the whole page is selected, another one when the scroll down button is selected.

What about on Mac? Well, it was much quicker to select the...