Aid Accessibility With OS X Parental Controls

Parental Controls are a feature of OS X which are intended to help parents limit and monitor a child’s computer use. Due to their ability to simplify the computer’s interface, they also have great potential as an accessibility aid for cognitively impaired users. Those with dementia, intellectual disabilities such as Down’s Syndrome, or brain injury may benefit from a simplified interface, as well as other parental control features.

This is the full list of features offered by Parental Controls – they didn’t alter significantly between Leopard and Snow Leopard. Most features can be selected singly if you want – you don’t have to use them all, just the one or more than suit your needs:

• Use Simple Finder to simplify the desktop, Finder menus, and Dock
• Limit the applications which can be opened by specifying a list of allowed applications
• Hide profanity in the OS X Dictionary
• Limit access to websites, either by using an automatic “net nanny” type list to hide certain websites, or by specifying a list of allowed websites which are the only ones which can be used
• Choose whether the user can burn CDs and DVDs, administer printers, change their password, and/or change their Dock icons
• Limit the people who can communicate with the user via iChat or email using Mail.app by specifying a list of allowed email addresses. You can set an address where permission emails will be sent if there is an attempt to exchange email with somebody not on the allowed list
• Set time limits for computer use in several ways, such as total hours the computer can be used on a weekday or weekend, and “bedtime” hours during which no computer use is allowed
• View logs of everything the user has done, using the “parent” account

It seems to me that Simple Finder offers significant promise to aid accessibility for those with cognitive impairments. It should be paired with limiting applications that can be used as the Simple Finder will hide any applications which can’t be used, therefore simplifying the interface further.

The Simple Finder offers a simplified version of the Mac OS X Finder. The Simple Finder has fewer menus and limits access to the items on the hard drive, it also uses “show more” arrows instead of scroll bars where there are more items than fit on one screen. The Simple Finder’s Dock only shows the three folders a user can view: My Applications, Documents, and Shared.

Parental controls must be administered from a separate administrator’s account, which can be on the user’s computer or on a remote computer. Once this is set up, you can control and alter all parental control settings from the “parent” account. There is a great set of Woopid tutorial videos describing the use of Parental Controls, start with Enabling Parental Controls and if you want to skip to the Simple Finder one it’s on the second page.

There are other methods of simplifying the interface of specific programs which I’ll cover in future posts. How do you ease Mac usage for cognitively impaired users? Which programs would you most like to see simplified?

- Ricky Buchanan