Vol. 6 No. 1 (2016): Journal of Accessibility and Design for All

This first issue of 2016 includes three articles regarding architecture and engineering but also have an impact on education. Architects, engineers and teachers design and build the society, environments and products of the future. The research presented in these papers will contribute improving the approach to the exercise of their profession and the way to serve the whole of society.The first article of present volume discusses the design of data collection tools to facilitate the inclusion of blind students in school building evaluations following the principles of Universal Design (UD). The goal of the study is to enable the incorporation of people with disability in field research in Architecture and Design through the application of appropriate investigation tools. The data collection instruments developed were a tactile map to support interviews with blind children and a 3D questionnaire as tactile models.The aim of the second study is to investigate the attitudes of architecture students towards people with a disability, comparing those who received inter-professional universal design education with those who had not.The motivation of the third article is the observation that many activities in both educational and work environments involve teamwork and searching on the web. The study aims to understand what barriers may exist to visually impaired searchers taking part in cross-modal collaborative information seeking. And also, what approaches are employed by participants to overcome these difficulties.  This study gives us the opportunity to detect the challenges and opportunities that exist in supporting visually impaired (VI) users to take an effective part in collaborative web search tasks with sighted peers.After presenting the content of the issue, it only remains to invite you to dive into the reading of the articles to discover in detail all new knowledge produced by the researchers.