Accessibility is often associated with structural changes or technical aids that are intended to make means of transport, events or everyday objects accessible to restricted user groups. But in computer science in particular, the development of accessible approaches often not only affects marginalized groups, but can also provide important impulses for the mainstream. Obvious examples of accessibility as a driver of innovation are technologies for the interpretation and synthesis of natural language, which for decades have enabled people with severely limited or no motor skills to interact with computers and their environment. Even if their use was only really practical in exceptional cases for a long time, they have now found their way into our everyday lives and are used on a daily basis by millions of people who dictate short messages on their smartphones more efficiently than typing them or prefer to ask a digital assistant for the weather rather than looking it up themselves.  

But surprisingly, this trend is not materializing for the use of desktop devices, even though today's operating systems can already be controlled with built-in features via speech recognition and eye tracking: Accessible input methods on PCs are unknown to many laypeople and are often seen by experts only as technical gimmicks or makeshift devices whose use is inherently awkward. As a consequence, the use of these alternative input methods is neither taught in studies nor in training, which makes it more difficult for those interested to get started and at the same time further consolidates the prevailing preference for the exclusive use of mouse and keyboard.

We aim to create sustainable informational resources to promote Handsfree Coding for increased efficiency to the broad mass of developers, and thus to establish it in the computer science community.

• Judith Michael, RWTH Aachen, Software Engineering Group
• Norbert Ritter, University of Hamburg, Databases and Information Systems Group