Imhotep: an approach to user and device conscious mobile applications

As the dependence on mobile devices increases, the need for supporting a wider range of users and devices becomes crucial. Elders and people with disabilities adopt new technologies reluctantly, a tendency caused by the lack of adaptation of these technologies to their needs. To address this challenge, this paper describes a framework, Imhotep, whose aim is to aid developers in the accessible application creation process, making the creation of user-centered applications easier and faster. Our framework allows to easily adapt the applications to the constraints imposed by the user capabilities (sensorial, cognitive, and physical capabilities) and device capabilities by providing a repository that will manage the compilation and deployment of applications that include a set of preprocessor directives in the source code. These directives are enhanced with concepts that are automatically adjusted to the current trends of mobile devices by using a Fuzzy Knowledge-Eliciting Reasoner. Our final goal is to increase the number of applications targeted to elders and people with disabilities providing tools that facilitate their development. The paper also describes the evaluation of both the accuracy of the fuzzy terms generated for mobile devices and the usability of the proposed platform.     

Providing universally accessible interactive services through TV sets: implementation and validation with elderly users

One of the challenges that Ambient Intelligence (AmI) faces is the provision of a usable interaction concept to its users, especially for those with a weak technical background. In this paper, we describe a new approach to integrate interactive services provided by an AmI environment with the television set, which is one of the most widely used interaction client in the home environment. The approach supports the integration of different TV set configurations, guaranteeing the possibility to develop universally accessible solutions. An implementation of this approach has been carried out as a multimodal/multi-purpose natural human computer interface for elderly people, by creating adapted graphical user interfaces and navigation menus together with multimodal interaction (simplified TV remote control and voice interaction). In addition, this user interface can also be suited to other user groups. We have tested a prototype that adapts the videoconference and the information service with a group of 83 users. The results from the user tests show that the group found the prototype to be both satisfactory and efficient to use.     

SymbolChat: A flexible picture-based communication platform for users with intellectual disabilities

Persons with intellectual disabilities benefit from participating in the modern information society, especially the World Wide Web, social media and Internet-mediated communication services. Although several computer-based prototypes and commercial systems have been introduced for accessible in-person communication, currently few applications and services exist to support synchronous remote communication for this user group. We introduce SymbolChat, a software platform that supports the creation of multimodal communication applications utilizing picture-based instant messaging. End users and their support personnel can customize the input and output features of the application based on their individual needs and abilities. The interaction is based on touchscreen input and speech output using speech synthesis technology. The SymbolChat platform was developed together with the prospective end users and practitioners in the field of special needs care.We evaluated the prototype application in a field study with nine users with varying degrees of intellectual and other disabilities. The results clearly indicate that the participants were able to express themselves in spontaneous communication using a large-scale picture-based vocabulary (around 2000 symbols) even without prior training in the use of symbols. This finding was supported in the constructive feedback gathered from professionals working in the area. We also successfully applied methodology from other settings, such as child-computer interaction to evaluate interaction in this challenging context.Overall, the results show that social inclusion for people with intellectual disabilities can be improved with customizable communication tools. The implemented communication platform forms a solid basis for further improvements and new communication services. In addition, we found that users with motor impairments would greatly benefit from alternative input and output methods for symbol browsing and selection.     

Accessible Ubiquitous Services for Supporting Daily Activities: A Case Study with Young Adults with Intellectual Disabilities

ABSTRACT

Ubiquitous environments have considerable potential to provide services supporting daily activities (using public transportation to and from workplace, using ATM machines, selecting and purchasing goods in ticketing or vending machines, etc.) in order to assist people with disabilities. Nevertheless, the ubiquitous service providers generally supply generic user interfaces which are not usually accessible for all potential end users. In this article, a case study to verify the adequacy of the user interfaces automatically generated by the Egoki system for two supporting ubiquitous services adapted to young adults with moderate intellectual disabilities was presented. The task completion times and the level of assistance required by participants when using the interfaces were analyzed. Participants were able to access services through a tablet and successfully complete the tasks, regardless of their level of expertise and familiarity with the service. Moreover, results indicate that their performance and confidence improved with practice, as they required fewer direct verbal and pointer cues to accomplish tasks. By applying observational methods during the experimental sessions, several potential improvements for the automated interface generation process were also detected.     

Investigating the problems faced by older adults and people with disabilities in online environments

Irresponsible and inaccessible web design causes unnecessary problems to certain website users. By applying the web content accessibility guidelines to a website the amount of possible users who can successfully view the content of that site will increase especially for those who are in the disabled and older adult categories of online users. We present the results of assessing the compliance of a selection of websites with guidelines set out by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). It was found that most sites evaluated were inaccessible to those with disabilities. Only one of the selected sites passed all three priority levels set out by the WAI. In many cases, minor modifications to sites will make them accessible to people with disabilities. Therefore it can only be speculated that the reasons for lack of conformance may vary from lack of awareness of the issue, time constraints or the general stress of having to keep up with new technologies. Companies who overlook users with disabilities however may be doing so at long-term risk to their legal position, public image and ultimately business success.     

Investigating the problems faced by older adults and people with disabilities in online environments

Irresponsible and inaccessible web design causes unnecessary problems to certain website users. By applying the web content accessibility guidelines to a website the amount of possible users who can successfully view the content of that site will increase especially for those who are in the disabled and older adult categories of online users. We present the results of assessing the compliance of a selection of websites with guidelines set out by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). It was found that most sites evaluated were inaccessible to those with disabilities. Only one of the selected sites passed all three priority levels set out by the WAI. In many cases, minor modifications to sites will make them accessible to people with disabilities. Therefore it can only be speculated that the reasons for lack of conformance may vary from lack of awareness of the issue, time constraints or the general stress of having to keep up with new technologies. Companies who overlook users with disabilities however may be doing so at long-term risk to their legal position, public image and ultimately business success.     

Anywhere,anytime (+anyone) access to the next-generation WWW

With inereasing power, miniaturization, and thin-client/NetPC structures, people will soon be able to access the full network environment wherever they are. Information access points/appliances will be built into the walls, incorporated into our working environments, carried and even worn by us, and used as an integral part of most of our daily activities.At the same time, as the Internet and information technologies are being woven into the fabric of education, business, and daily life, greater attention is being focused on whether the ordinary person, including those with disabilities, will be able to access and use these systems.It is interesting that these two seemingly different objectives have similar solutions. If we design systems which are truly ubiquitous and nomadic; that we can use whether we are walking down the hall, driving the car, sitting at our workstation, or sitting in a meeting; that we can use when we're under stress or distracted; and that make it easy for us to locate and use new services — we will have created systems which are accessible to almost anyone with a physical or sensory disability. We will also have gone a long way to creating systems that are usable by a large percentage of the population who currently find systems aversive or difficult to learn. In addition, strategies and ideas developed for people with disabilities can provide valuable techniques and insights into creating devices for all nomadic computer users.     

Improving Web access for visually impaired users

Technology advances and the continuing convergence of computing and telecommunications have made an unprecedented amount of information available to the public. For many people with disabilities, however, accessibility issues limit the impact of such widespread availability. Of the many types of disabilities-mobility, hearing, and learning impairments, for example-vision impairments are most pervasive in the general population, especially among seniors. The world's rapidly aging population is redefining visually impaired, which refers to individuals with low vision (that is, people for whom ordinary eyeglasses, contact lenses, or intraocular lens implants don't provide clear vision), color blindness, and blindness. In 1998, the US Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act, strengthening provisions covering access to government-posted information for people with disabilities. As amended, Section 508 requires federal agencies to ensure that all assets and technologies are accessible and usable by employees and the public, regardless of physical, sensory, or cognitive disabilities. Most current assistive technologies for visually impaired users are expensive, difficult to use, and platform dependent. A new approach by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH), addresses these weaknesses by locating the assistive capability at the server, thus freeing visually impaired individuals from the software expense, technical complexity, and substantial learning curve of other assistive technologies. NLM's Senior Health Web site (http://nihseniorhealth.gov), a talking Web (a Web application that presents Web content as speech to users), demonstrates the approach's effectiveness.     

User-driven visual composition of service-based interactive spaces

ObjectiveThe overall objective of the research work presented in this paper is to investigate models, methods and architectures to replace fixed, pre-packaged applications with flexible composition environments that make interactive environments “emerge” at run-time, based on composition actions performed by non-technical users. The approach aims at the lightweight construction of integrated, situational workspaces pervasively accessible and sharable through a variety of devices.MethodsBased on a meta-design approach, we designed and implemented a platform that allows end users, not necessarily experts of technologies, to extract contents from heterogeneous sources and compose Personal Information Spaces (PISs) that satisfy their information needs. Specific emphasis is posed on the adoption of a composition paradigm that abstracts from technical details and can thus be used by non-technical users.ResultsThe platform for service composition that supports the activity of the different involved stakeholders is described in details. Thanks to the separation of concerns on which the composition paradigm is based, the overall approach and its enabling platform are also amenable to customization with respect to the requirements of specific domains.ConclusionWe present an approach where a composition platform enables the extraction of content from heterogeneous services and its integration into situational applications where content presentation is flexibly managed through different visual templates. We also discuss the advantages offered by this approach to the stakeholders of a specific community of users in the Cultural Heritage domain.PracticeThe developed prototypes were evaluated in laboratories and field studies: the former aimed at investigating the ease of use and the users satisfaction of the functionality and the user interface of the environment for domain customization, the latter aimed instead at observing real users (e.g., guides of an archeological park) in action, to assess the validity of the proposed composition paradigm as an EUD practice.ImplicationsThe user studies described in this paper provided hints for refining the prototypes, and laid the basis for future work related to the identification of design principles that can make service-based composition technologies in general more useful and usable for end users.     

User-generated contents and reasoning-based personalization: Ingredients for a novel model of mobile TV

During the last years, we have witnessed the boom of the digital market due to the proliferation of emergent audiovisual services and the increasing number of broadband networks. In this scenario, users insistently demand innovative services for exchanging and sharing their own audiovisual contents. In order to meet these needs, in this paper we propose a system that broadcasts user-generated audiovisual contents for handheld devices in a mobile network based on the DVB-H broadcasting standard. Besides, our system offers diverse added-value services to these new active users, such as: (i) multi modal access (via Web or by client applications running locally in handheld devices) to digital contents, (ii) exploitation of return channels to transmit interactive contents that enhance the user’s experience, and (iii) annotation, sharing and personalized distribution of audiovisual contents. To achieve these goals, our system adopts well-known technologies for broadcasting and semantic annotation of audiovisual contents, as well as emergent technology from the so-called Web 2.0. A prototype of our system has been experimentally evaluated with a group of students from the University of Vigo, who were enthusiastic about the personalization capabilities offered by our TV system for a mobile setting.     

Supporting content discovery and organization in networks of contents and users

The design of approaches for supporting the user in the navigation of a variety of contents is an interesting area of research with many potential applications. In particular, interactive television (iTV) offers users the opportunity of accessing a huge amount of contents, ranging from general to specialized ones. As a consequence, the exploration of such contents must be supported in some way. In this paper, we present an innovative approach that integrates some recent methodologies and technologies developed in different areas of Artificial Intelligence and the Web: user-model-based adaptation, social networking, semantic annotation, and content sharing. We show how the integration of these technologies can provide interesting opportunities for a new approach to content navigation and discovery based on the possibility of exploring personalized networks of contents, users and concepts. Also, we focus on the specific goal of designing a platform for accessing iTV contents with the aim of providing the user with many alternative ways of exploring and discovering potentially interesting videos. After discussing the application, integrated in a project by Telecom Italia for a new paradigm of iTV, we preset the architecture we designed for integrating the methodologies discussed above.     

Accessible wayfinding and navigation: a systematic mapping study

Urban environments, university campuses, and public and private buildings often present architectural barriers that prevent people with disabilities and special needs to move freely and independently. This paper presents a systematic mapping study of the scientific literature proposing devices, and software applications aimed at fostering accessible wayfinding and navigation in indoor and outdoor environments. We selected 111 out of 806 papers published in the period 2009–2020, and we analyzed them according to different dimensions: at first, we surveyed which solutions have been proposed to address the considered problem; then, we analyzed the selected papers according to five dimensions: context of use, target users, hardware/software technologies, type of data sources, and user role in system design and evaluation. Our findings highlight trends and gaps related to these dimensions. The paper finally presents a reflection on challenges and open issues that must be taken into consideration for the design of future accessible places and of related technologies and applications aimed at facilitating wayfinding and navigation.

     

M2S maps: supporting real-world navigation with mobile VR

Mobile devices are becoming increasingly integrated into our society. In addition to entertaining people with applications like pervasive games, mobile devices can also help to address cognitive challenges people face in the real world. This paper, by drawing on research findings from cognitive psychology and geography, explores a design to use mobile VR to help people overcome one cognitive barrier in navigation, which is to establish the correspondence between 2D spatial information found in maps and 3D entities they perceive from the real world. The design offers users multi-format, multi-scale, and semantic (M²S) maps, ranging from 2D maps to 3D immersive environments, and helps users to connect 2D maps to the real world through 3D environments which are equipped with semantic representation and animation techniques. Consequently, users can apply various kinds of spatial knowledge, 2D or 3D, in understanding the real world as well as assisting in navigation. This research enhances the design repertoire of mobile VR, and suggests a way to integrate virtual environments into people’s real-world life by examining the cognitive implications of 3D models on users’ activities.     

A proposal of ubiquitous fuzzy computing for Ambient Intelligence

Ambient Intelligence is considered as the composition of three emergent technologies: Ubiquitous Computing, Ubiquitous Communication and Intelligent User Interfaces. The aim of integration of aforesaid technologies is to make wider the interaction between human beings and information technology equipment through the usage of an invisible network of ubiquitous computing devices composing dynamic computational-ecosystems capable of satisfy the users requirements. Many works focus the attention on the interaction from users to devices in order to allow an universal and immediate access to available content and services provided by the environment. This paper, vice versa, focuses on the reverse interactions, from devices to users, in order to realize a collection of autonomous control services able to minimize the human effort. In particular, by merging computational intelligence methodologies with standard Web technologies we show how ubiquitous devices will be able to find the suitable set of intelligent services in a transparent way.     

The Art of the Accessibility Statement

ABSTRACT

Many libraries recognize the need to create Web sites accessible to users with disabilities, as legislated in U.S. Code Section 508, but Section 508 compliance defines a minimum legal level of accessibility. The same technology that can make a Web site available to users with disabilities can also make the site available to users with wireless devices, such as PDAs and cell phones, with Internet access. To bring about “maximum accessibility,” library Web designers need to implement Web standards. This article argues the place to begin implementing these standards is with an accessibility statement which serves as both a contract and a navigational aid.     

The H-N2N framework: towards providing interperception in massive applications

We propose a framework with a flexible architecture that have been designed and implemented for collaborative interaction of users, to be applied in massive applications through the Web. We introduce the concept of interperception and use technologies as massive virtual environments and teleoperation for the creation of environments (mixing virtual and real ones) in order to promote accessibility and transparency in the interaction between people, and between people and animate devices (such as robots) through the Web. Experiments with massive games, with interactive applications in digital television, with users and robots interacting in virtual and real versions of museums and cultural centers are presented to validate our proposal.     

Secure and light IoT protocol (SLIP) for anti-hacking

In the elemental technologies, it is necessary to realize the Internet service of things (IoT), sensors and devices, network, platform (hardware platforms, open software platform, such as specific OS platforms). Web services, data analysis and prediction, big data processing, such as security and privacy protection technology, there are a variety of techniques. These elements technology provide a specific function. The element technology is integrated with each other. However, by several techniques are integrated, it can be problems with integration of security technologies that existed for each element technology. Even if individual technologies basic security features are constituting Internet Services (CIA: Confidentiality, integrity, authentication or authorization). It also offers security technology not connected to each other. Therefore, I will look at the security technology and proposes a lightweight routing protocol indispensable for realizing a secure Internet services things.     

Basic support for cooperative work on the World Wide Web

The emergence and widespread adoption of the World Wide Web offers a great deal of potential in supporting cross-platform cooperative work within widely dispersed working groups. The Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW) project at GMD is attempting to realize this potential through development of web-based tools which provide cross-platform collaboration services to groups using existing web technologies. This paper describes one of these tools, theBSCW Shared Workspace system—a centralized cooperative application integrated with an unmodified web server and accessible from standard web browsers. The BSCW system supports cooperation through “shared workspaces”; small repositories in which users can upload documents, hold threaded discussions and obtain information on the previous activities of other users to coordinate their own work. The current version of the system is described in detail, including design choices resulting from use of the web as a cooperation platform and feedback from users following the release of a previous version of BSCW to the public domain.