A linguistic evaluation approach for universal design

Universal design (UD) is an approach for developing products and environments that are usable by all people to the greatest extent possible. It benefits users of all ages and abilities without the need for adaptation or specialized design. Although a set of acknowledged principles has been developed and commonly used by industry and academia, it is difficult to quantitatively evaluate whether a product is indeed a good example of UD. This study improves the shortcomings of traditional analytical hierarchy process (AHP) methods in quantitative judgments, priority analysis, and aggregation performance, and proposes a linguistic evaluation approach for UD. The aims of this study are (1) to construct a hierarchy for evaluation using criteria against the UD principles, (2) to develop a convenient and effective eigenvalue algorithm for deriving the weights of criteria, and (3) to aggregate preference information and rank the order of decision alternatives by using linguistic variables associated with fuzzy weighted average techniques. An empirical study is conducted to illustrate the practicability of the proposed approach. In addition to UD, the proposed linguistic evaluation approach can be used to systematically assess alternatives from criteria that are relevant to a set of qualitative attributes.