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Tools and Resources

TUSK - Trace Usability Screening Kit

TUSKs icon

The Trace Usability Screening Kit (TUSK) provides a set of tools that can be used to identify some of the problems that people with disabilities might encounter in using a product.

Quoting from the Trace Center website,

  1. TUSK can be used by product designers to screen early prototypes, uncovering major obstacles to accessibility in the early stages of product development - prior to usability testing.
  2. TUSK can be used by consultants doing product reviews.
  3. TUSK can be used by educators as part of awareness training related to the types of usability problems encountered by people with functional limitations.

    4. See the Trace Center web site for more details.

It took me several years of struggling with the heavy door to my building, sometimes having to wait until a person stronger came along, to realize that the door was an accessibility problem, not only for me, but for others as well. And I did not notice, until one of my students pointed it out, that the lack of signs that could be read from a distance at my university forced people with mobility impairments to expend a lot of energy unnecessarily, searching for rooms and offices. Although I have encountered this difficulty myself on days when walking was exhausting to me, I interpreted it, automatically, as a problem arising from my illness (as I did with the door), rather than as a problem arising from the built environment having been created for too narrow a range of people and situations.

Susan Wendell, author of
The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability