4,936 research outputs found

    HBB4ALL: Deployment of HbbTV Services for All

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    Hybrid Broadcast Television for All is a European Commission co-financed project, inside the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP). The project builds on HbbTV, the European standard for broadcast and broadband multimedia converged services, and looks at how HbbTV technology may be used to enhance access services (such as subtitling, audio description or sign language) on both the production and service sides. HbbTV 1.5 devices are widely available in the market while HbbTV version 2.0 specification has been recently released. TV content can be enhanced by HbbTV applications with additional synchronised services in a personalised manner. For access services this opens an entirely new opportunity for users who may choose an access service delivered via their IP connection which seamlessly integrates with the regular broadcast programme. The presentation will describe the improvements taken on board by HBB4ALL to existing access services and ways of addressing the key technical, organisational and legal obstacles to the sustainable take-up of these services throughout Europe. HBB4ALL focuses on real pilot deployment as a first step to ensure a successful exploitation of these services in a near future. We will offer new insights, from the fields of human machine interaction and social innovation, which arise from the new interactive multimodal and multilanguage services which may be offered. This article will first describe the structure chosen for the project, with four pilots developed in parallel: subtitling, audio description, sign language and user interaction. Then it will describe the methodology and research approaches used for testing the new accessibility services

    E-learning in Information Accessibility of Disabled Assistant Technology

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    Internet Architecture and Disability

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    The Internet is essential for education, employment, information, and cultural and democratic participation. For tens of millions of people with disabilities in the United States, barriers to accessing the Internet—including the visual presentation of information to people who are blind or visually impaired, the aural presentation of information to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and the persistence of Internet technology, interfaces, and content without regard to prohibitive cognitive load for people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities—collectively pose one of the most significant civil rights issues of the information age. Yet disability law lacks a comprehensive theoretical approach for fully facilitating Internet accessibility. The prevailing doctrinal approach to Internet accessibility seeks to treat websites as metaphorical “places” subject to Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which requires places of public accommodations to be accessible to people with disabilities. While this place-centric approach to Title III has succeeded to a significant degree in making websites accessible over the last two decades, large swaths of the Internet—more broadly construed to include Internet technologies beyond websites—remain inaccessible to millions of people with a variety of disabilities. As limitations of a place-based approach to Title III become clearer, a new framework for disability law is needed in an increasingly intermediated Internet. Leveraging the Internet-law literature on perspectives, this article recognizes the place-centric approach to Title III as normatively and doctrinally “internal,” in the terminology of Internet-law scholars. It offers a framework for supplementing this internal approach with an external approach that contemplates the layered architecture of the Internet, including its constituent content, web and non-web applications, access networks operated by Internet service providers, and devices and the role of disability and other bodies of law, particularly including telecommunications law and attendant policy issues, such as net neutrality, in making them accessible

    Human-powered smartphone assistance for blind people

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    Mobile devices are fundamental tools for inclusion and independence. Yet, there are still many open research issues in smartphone accessibility for blind people (Grussenmeyer and Folmer 2017). Currently, learning how to use a smartphone is non-trivial, especially when we consider that the need to learn new apps and accommodate to updates never ceases. When first transitioning from a basic feature-phone, people have to adapt to new paradigms of interaction. Where feature phones had a finite set of applications and functions, users can extend the possible functions and uses of a smartphone by installing new 3rd party applications. Moreover, the interconnectivity of these applications means that users can explore a seemingly endless set of workflows across applications. To that end, the fragmented nature of development on these devices results in users needing to create different mental models for each application. These characteristics make smartphone adoption a demanding task, as we found from our eight-week longitudinal study on smartphone adoption by blind people. We conducted multiple studies to characterize the smartphone challenges that blind people face, and found people often require synchronous, co-located assistance from family, peers, friends, and even strangers to overcome the different barriers they face. However, help is not always available, especially when we consider the disparity in each barrier, individual support network and current location. In this dissertation we investigated if and how in-context human-powered solutions can be leveraged to improve current smartphone accessibility and ease of use. Building on a comprehensive knowledge of the smartphone challenges faced and coping mechanisms employed by blind people, we explored how human-powered assistive technologies can facilitate use. The thesis of this dissertation is: Human-powered smartphone assistance by non-experts is effective and impacts perceptions of self-efficacy

    Internet Architecture and Disability

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    The Internet is essential for education, employment, information, and cultural and democratic participation. For tens of millions of people with disabilities in the United States, barriers to accessing the Internet—including the visual presentation of information to people who are blind or visually impaired, the aural presentation of information to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and the persistence of Internet technology, interfaces, and content without regard to prohibitive cognitive load for people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities—collectively pose one of the most significant civil rights issues of the information age. Yet disability law lacks a comprehensive theoretical approach for fully facilitating Internet accessibility. The prevailing doctrinal approach to Internet accessibility seeks to treat websites as metaphorical “places” subject to Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which requires places of public accommodations to be accessible to people with disabilities. While this place-centric approach to Title III has succeeded to a significant degree in making websites accessible over the last two decades, large swaths of the Internet—more broadly construed to include Internet technologies beyond websites—remain inaccessible to millions of people with a variety of disabilities. As limitations of a place-based approach to Title III become clearer, a new framework for disability law is needed in an increasingly intermediated Internet. Leveraging the Internet-law literature on perspectives, this article recognizes the place-centric approach to Title III as normatively and doctrinally “internal,” in the terminology of Internet-law scholars. It offers a framework for supplementing this internal approach with an external approach that contemplates the layered architecture of the Internet, including its constituent content, web and non-web applications, access networks operated by Internet service providers, and devices and the role of disability and other bodies of law, particularly including telecommunications law and attendant policy issues, such as net neutrality, in making them accessible

    Multimodal Accessibility of Documents

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    Digital Accessibility and Disability Accommodations in Online Dispute Resolution: ODR for Everyone

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    Court systems are exploring and beginning to adopt online dispute resolution (ODR) systems, and it is critical that they make digital accessibility a priority. Even though we need to pay close attention to ODR developments in court systems, we cannot overlook the fact that there are ODR providers in the private sector whose systems also must be accessible for persons with disabilities. Plaintiffs filed more ADA Title III website accessibility lawsuits in federal court for the first six months of 2018 than in all of 2017. There were at least 1053 such lawsuits in the first six months of 2018, compared to 814 in all of 2017. As websites have become more sophisticated, access to them has worsened. This article will revisit the question of what digital accessibility standards are legally required. Although the threat of legal liability for failing to satisfy well-respected privately promulgated standards is still real, making a website digitally accessible will make it easier for everyone to use and may attract new users. Websites, mobile applications, software platforms, and other technologies will be accessible when developed and designed to internationally recognized accessibility standards. A host of best practices related to business processes and training are available to ensure accessibility for ODR systems. This Article offers ODR system designers, practicing neutrals such as mediators and arbitrators, information technology professionals, private and public decisionmakers, and policymakers essential information and tools to build and maintain systems that work for everyone. It is extremely important that the ODR community focus on digital accessibility at this moment, because ODR systems are not only being implemented in the United States; they are being adopted around the world

    Modeling an ontology on accessible evacuation routes for emergencies

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    Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. However, this is a challenging goal for researchers and professionals due to the diverse pool of prospective users, e.g. people with disabilities as well as other vulnerable groups. Moreover, in the event of an emergency situation, many people could become vulnerable because of exceptional circumstances such as stress, an unknown environment or even visual impairment (e.g. fire causing smoke). Within this scope, a crucial activity is to notify affected people about safe places and available evacuation routes. In order to address this need, we propose to extend an ontology, called SEMA4A (Simple EMergency Alert 4 [for] All), developed in a previous work for managing knowledge about accessibility guidelines, emergency situations and communication technologies. In this paper, we introduce a semi-automatic technique for knowledge acquisition and modeling on accessible evacuation routes. We introduce a use case to show applications of the ontology and conclude with an evaluation involving several experts in evacuation procedures. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

    A framework for the assembly and delivery of multimodal graphics in E-learning environments

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    In recent years educators and education institutions have embraced E-Learning environments as a method of delivering content to and communicating with their learners. Particular attention needs to be paid to the accessibility of the content that each educator provides. In relation to graphics, content providers are instructed to provide textual alternatives for each graphic using either the “alt” attribute or the “longdesc” attribute of the HTML IMG tag. This is not always suitable for graphical concepts inherent in technical topics due to the spatial nature of the information. As there is currently no suggested alternative to the use of textual descriptions in E-Learning environments, blind learners are at a signiïŹcant disadvantage when attempting to learn Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematical (STEM) subjects online. A new approach is required that will provide blind learners with the same learning capabilities enjoyed by their sighted peers in relation to graphics. Multimodal graphics combine the modalities of sound and touch in order to deliver graphical concepts to blind learners. Although they have proven successful, they can be time consuming to create and often require expertise in accessible graphic design. This thesis proposes an approach based on mainstream E-Learning techniques that can support non-experts in the assembly of multimodal graphics. The approach is known as the Multimodal Graphic Assembly and Delivery Framework (MGADF). It exploits a component based Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to provide non experts with the ability to assemble multimodal graphics and integrate them into mainstream E-Learning environments. This thesis details the design of the system architecture, information architecture and methodologies of the MGADF. Proof of concept interfaces were implemented, based on the design, that clearly demonstrate the feasibility of the approach. The interfaces were used in an end-user evaluation that assessed the beneïŹts of a component based approach for non-expert multimodal graphic producers
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