Accessibility History – TRACE

How EZ Access Came To Be

Introduction

Understanding the basis of EZ Access is critical if you work with self-service, kiosks, or ATMs. Too often, teams treat accessibility as a checklist or bolt-on, without appreciating the decades of research, policy work, and real-world deployments that shaped this particular approach. EZ Access is not just a keypad or an audio jack; it’s an entire interaction model, licensing framework, and legal/IP ecosystem that affects how you design, buy, deploy, and certify devices. If you don’t understand its foundations, you’re flying blind on risk, cost, and true usability. Thanks to Gregg Vanderheiden for providing the source information.

The Trace Center EZ-Access

The Trace Center’s EZ Access work grew out of decades of research on how to make technology usable for people with a wide range of disabilities, culminating in a practical, repeatable approach to accessible kiosks and information/transaction machines (ITMs). For self-service practitioners, it represents a bridge between high-level universal design principles and concrete, field-tested interaction patterns that can be implemented at scale.Vanderheiden-et-al_20220322-Smaller-a.pdf​

From communication boards to public machines

The Trace Center began in 1971, when students built custom communication systems for a 12‑year‑old boy with severe cerebral palsy who could only “talk” by slowly pointing to letters on a wooden board. That work forced the team to solve problems around noisy input, limited motor control, fatigue, and real‑time feedback—issues that show up again decades later in kiosk design.​

• The group evolved into the Trace Research & Development Center, becoming a key player in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), assistive technology, and early computer access.​

• Along the way, the Center helped shape concepts like universal/inclusive design and “electronic curb cuts,” emphasizing that solutions for people with disabilities often improve usability for everyone.​

Why kiosks became a focus

By the late 1990s, self-service devices—ATMs, ticket machines, government service kiosks, voting systems—were becoming critical access points for everyday services, but they were largely designed for sighted, hearing, and able-bodied users. For people with disabilities, these devices could be effectively locked doors: no staff in sight, timeouts on screens, and no way to override poor physical placement or confusing interfaces.​

• Trace recognized that as services moved from staffed counters to unattended machines, accessibility failures would directly block civic participation, travel, banking, and healthcare.​

• The Center’s earlier work on consumer electronics and web guidelines gave it a foundation for translating accessibility principles into the more constrained, time-limited context of kiosks and ITMs.​

The birth of EZ Access

EZ Access emerged around 1999 as a coherent interaction model for making a variety of public information and transaction machines usable by people with different sensory, physical, and cognitive abilities. Rather than reinventing the interface for each disability, Trace created a small set of consistent mechanisms that could be learned once and then reused across machines and vendors.​

Key ideas behind EZ Access included:​

• A dedicated set of physical controls (typically a few tactilely distinct buttons) located in a consistent, reachable place across devices.

• Audio output, with private listening via a standard headphone jack and speech that walks users through the screen content and actions.

• A logical “focus” and navigation model that lets users move through on‑screen elements step by step without needing to see or accurately touch the screen.

This model allowed a blind user, for example, to plug in headphones, press a single button to start audio guidance, and then use the same small set of buttons to move through options and confirm selections across different kiosk types.​

Practical patterns for kiosk designers

EZ Access turned abstract accessibility goals into practical design patterns that could be applied to real-world kiosks, including:

Consistent control cluster

• • Use a small group of tactilely identifiable buttons (e.g., left, right, select, help/cancel) placed in the same relative location on every machine.​

  • Ensure high contrast, tactile labels, and clear affordances so users can operate them without vision or fine motor control.​

• Audio guidance and discoverability

  • Provide a standard audio start action (e.g., inserting headphones or pressing a specific button) that consistently initiates spoken instructions.​

  • Structure audio so it reflects the screen hierarchy, allowing users to step through headings, choices, and confirmations without being overwhelmed by long monologues.​

• Focused navigation instead of free pointing

  • Instead of requiring accurate touch, let users move focus from one actionable item to the next, with audio feedback on where they are and what will happen if they activate it.​

  • This benefits users who are blind, have low vision, tremors, or limited range of motion, and it reduces error rates for everyone.Vanderheiden-et-al_20220322-Smaller-a.pdf​

• Cross-disability support

  • Design the interaction so the same control set helps users who are blind, have low vision, have limited dexterity, or have some cognitive impairments, rather than bolting on a separate mode per disability.​

  • Provide timeouts and error handling that are forgiving, with simple ways to go back, repeat instructions, or cancel without losing all progress.​

Pilots, voting prototypes, and field experience

Trace’s EZ Access concepts were prototyped and tested in multiple kiosk domains, including public information kiosks, ticketing systems, and voting machines. Cross-disability voting prototypes demonstrated that a single machine could serve voters with a wide range of needs, reducing the need for segregated equipment or separate processes.

These prototypes explored issues like privacy for blind voters, error recovery when using audio navigation, and ways to confirm selections both visually and audibly.​

• The work also highlighted infrastructure concerns such as standardizing headphone jacks, ensuring volume control, and dealing with ambient noise in public locations.​

Experience across deployments fed back into refined button layouts, improved audio scripting practices, and better strategies for training staff and end users.​

Standards, policy, and the broader impact

EZ Access did not live only as a set of prototypes; it contributed to the thinking behind later standards and regulations covering kiosks and ITMs. Trace’s work intersected with U.S. accessibility law (Sections 255 and 508), web standards like WCAG, and emerging guidance on accessible electronic consumer products.​

• A core insight was that being “technology agnostic” at the policy level (focusing on outcomes rather than specific devices) allowed models like EZ Access to influence a broad set of platforms.​

• Trace also emphasized tools—checklists, guidelines, and test methods—that helped manufacturers and integrators evaluate self-service systems against concrete accessibility requirements.​

As a result, many modern kiosks incorporate descendants of EZ Access concepts: dedicated tactile controls, headphone jacks, audio navigation, and focus-based interaction. Even when not branded as EZ Access, the underlying patterns have influenced how major vendors and agencies approach accessible self-service.​

Takeaways for today’s self-service teams

For organizations deploying or specifying kiosks and ITMs today, the EZ Access story offers several lessons​

• Design once, benefit many: A unified control and navigation model simplifies training, support, and maintenance while helping multiple disability groups.

• Consistency across contexts: Users should be able to learn a handful of interaction patterns and reuse them on ticketing, check‑in, payment, and government kiosks.

• Treat accessibility as core infrastructure: Plan for audio, tactile controls, and focus-based navigation as part of the base design, not as afterthoughts or “special modes.”

• Use standards, but design beyond compliance: Regulations set the floor; EZ Access shows how to turn compliance into a coherent, efficient user experience.

For self-service professionals, EZ Access is less a single product and more a mature design language for accessible kiosks—rooted in decades of research, refined in real deployments, and still highly relevant as new self-service form factors and AI-powered interfaces emerge.​