91 research outputs found

    Accessible software development: a conceptual model proposal

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    Equal access to all software and digital content should be a reality in the Digital Era. This argument is something defended both by existing regulations, norms and standards, and also business organizations and governments. Despite this acknowledgement, the reality is still far from the desired equality. For certain groups of disabled or impaired citizens, such as the visually impaired, the existence of e-accessibility compliance represents an opportunity to integrate, in a more simple and straightforward manner, their societies. Despite the existing poor results on e-accessibility compliance, the mentioned citizens insist on using digital devices in their daily lives. Even though, in the last decade, multiple standards and regulations have been published towards indicating how to develop accessible digital user interfaces, there are still two major issues surrounding its implementation: the complexity and disparity of the documents containing the abovementioned norms, and also the lack of e-accessibility know-how by software experts. With this in mind, a proposal for an accessible software development model that encompasses e-accessibility incorporation as one of the development process activities has been presented. This model might represent a very interesting support tool for software development organizations and a novel resource for learning and training institutions to be able to improve their computer science and informatics students’ skills on e-accessibility.This work was supported by national funds through the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the Project UID/CEC/04524/2016. This work was financed by the ERDF—European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Program for Competitiveness and Internationalization—COMPETE 2020 within Project (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006961), and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT— Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia as part of Project (UID/EEA/50014/2013).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Evaluarea accesibilității web în eHealth: un studiu de caz pe șapte site-uri

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    This paper analyzes the accessibility of web content of medical platforms in accordance with the international guidelines established by W3C and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The article presents the results of a May 2018 study on web accessibility for health sites. The evaluation was done on a sample of seven sites using an automated testing tool. The evaluation was performed on a sample of seven sites using an automated test tool - Total Validator. The study demonstrated a relatively low web accessibility of the analyzed eHealth websites and highlighted general accessibility recommendations

    Towards Design Theory for Accessible IT Artefacts

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    Accessibility in the use of information technology (IT) artefacts, such as websites, applications, and user interfaces, means that they are designed in such a way that people with the broadest range of abilities can use them. However, although accessibility is a human right, IT artefacts often remain inaccessible. Aside from the available accessibility guidelines, we need sufficient design theories that explicitly state how accessibility should be addressed and designed to develop accessible IT artefacts for all users. This dissertation summarises four articles that address this problem. These studies are conducted with qualitative approaches that include a narrative literature review, a systematic literature review and a design science method comprising a participatory design and interviews. The first article develops an explaining theory of accessibility to gain an understanding of the construct of accessibility, showing possible variables of human abilities, tasks and contexts and their relationships in IT use. The second article illustrates the factors in management, development, user, and IT artefact features, including the roles and actions that these domains have and how they affect the realisation of accessibility. The other two articles contribute to accessibility guidance to improve and support content creators’ text production and writing process of accessible online text in the web context. The dissertation underscores three key determinants of the knowledge of accessibility: (1) assumptions of users’ abilities; (2) users’ actual needs; and (3) factors in the development chain. The foregoing factors contribute to the knowledge of accessibility and would help researchers, particularly design scientists, form prescriptive knowledge for practitioners to achieve accessible IT artefacts. Thus, researchers could better identify the variables, relationships and affecting factors in human abilities, management, development, content creation, tasks, and contexts that need to be addressed when designing IT artefacts for certain tasks and use contexts.Informaatioteknologia-artefaktien (IT-artefaktien), kuten verkkosivustojen, sovellusten ja käyttöliittymien saavutettavuus tarkoittaa sitä, että ihmiset erilaisine ominaisuuksineen ja kykyineen voivat käyttää niitä. Vaikka saavutettavuus on ihmisoikeus, IT-artefaktit eivät kuitenkaan ole aina saavutettavia. Käytettävissä olevista saavutettavuusohjeista huolimatta tarvitsemme suunnitteluteorioita, jotka ohjaavat IT-artefaktien suunnittelua, jotta niistä tulisi saavutettavia kaikille IT-artefaktin käyttäjille. Tämä väitöskirja on yhteenveto neljästä artikkelista, jotka käsittelevät tätä ongelmaa. Tutkimukset ovat tehty laadullisilla menetelmillä, joihin on sisältynyt narratiivinen kirjallisuuskatsaus, systemaattinen kirjallisuuskatsaus sekä suunnittelutieteellinen menetelmä sisältäen osallistavan suunnittelun ja haastattelut. Ensimmäisessä artikkelissa kehitetään kuvaileva saavutettavuuden teoria, jolla saadaan käsitys saavutettavuuden rakenteesta ja joka näyttää mahdolliset muuttujat ihmisen kyvyissä, tehtävissä ja konteksteissa, sekä niiden väliset suhteet. Toinen artikkeli kuvaa saavutettavuuteen vaikuttavia tekijöitä johtamisen, kehityksen, käyttäjän ja IT-artefaktin ominaisuuksien näkökulmista, mukaan lukien roolit ja toimenpiteet, joita näillä kohteilla on. Kaksi muuta artikkelia kehittävät ohjeistuksen sisällöntuottajien työn tueksi saavutettavan verkkotekstin tuottamiseksi. Väitöskirjassa esitetään kolme ratkaisevaa tekijää saavutettavuuden tietämyksessä: (1) olettamukset käyttäjien kyvyistä (2) käyttäjien todelliset tarpeet ja (3) tekijät kehitysketjussa. Näiden tekijöiden tuntemus auttaa erityisesti suunnittelutieteilijöitä muodostamaan ohjaavaa tietoa ammattilaisille saavutettavien IT-artefaktien saavuttamiseksi. Täten tutkijat voivat paremmin tunnistaa muuttujat, niiden väliset suhteet ja saavutettavuuteen vaikuttavat tekijät, jotka liittyvät käyttäjän kykyihin, johtamiseen, kehittämiseen, sisällöntuottamiseen, tehtäviin ja kontekstiin, kun IT-artefaktia suunnitellaan tiettyä tehtävää ja käyttökontekstia varten.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

    Designing Heuristics for Accessible Online Text Production

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    Governments and public organisations provide digital services and share information on websites, so web content needs to be accessible to all citizens. Text remains the main form of providing information, and reading is the primary way to interact with digital services. However, existing guidelines are not adequate for content creators in public organisations. The wide scope and technicality of these guidelines make them confusing, difficult to understand and challenging to implement. To respond to this emerging need, in this paper, we contribute improvements to the guidance of accessible text production by proposing heuristics with a design science approach. Specifically, we (1) review accessibility guidelines and determine improvement factors related to text accessibility, (2) establish a design and evaluation workshop with 38 students, and (3) verify the feasibility of the proposal with content creators. Our evidence shows that the proposed accessibility heuristics are clear and easy to understand, and they are useful for content creators.© 2022 Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems & Authors.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

    UNDERSTANDING MOTIVATORS AND CHALLENGES IN ACCESSIBILITY DEVELOPMENT

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    We analyzed secondary data from nine studies including a total of 1962 respondents on what motivates web practitioners such as user experience developers, web designers, and web masters’ intention to promote accessibility, and what challenges they encounter during accessibility development. In this ex-ploratory study, we adopt the viewpoint of motivation and challenges and aim to study them from in-trinsic and extrinsic viewpoints. We then interpreted intrinsic and extrinsic motivators and intrinsic and extrinsic challenges that should be addressed in the management of accessibility work so that the main accessibility milestones become implemented in the design of information technology artifacts. We re-trieved recommendations for top management and superiors to gain and support practitioners’ motiva-tion and to address challenges in accessibility development to avoid ethical conflict in accessibility development. These findings strengthen an understanding of possible ethical conflicts in accessibility development and help to act responsibly in the accessibility development of information systems

    Factors Affecting the Accessibility of IT Artifacts : A Systematic Review

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    Accessibility awareness and development have improved in the past two decades, but many users still encounter accessibility barriers when using information technology (IT) artifacts (e.g., user interfaces and websites). Current research in information systems and human-computer interaction disciplines explores methods, techniques, and factors affecting the accessibility of IT artifacts for a particular population and provides solutions to address these barriers. However, design realized in one solution should be used to provide accessibility to the widest range of users, which requires an integration of solutions. To identify the factors that cause accessibility barriers and the solutions for users with different needs, a systematic literature review was conducted. This paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge by revealing (1) management- and development-level factors, and (2) user perspective factors affecting accessibility that address different accessibility barriers to different groups of population (based on the International Classification of Functioning by the World Health Organization). Based on these findings, we synthesize and illustrate the factors and solutions that need to be addressed when creating an accessible IT artifact.© 2022 by the Association for Information Systems. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and full citation on the first page. Copyright for components of this work owned by others than the Association for Information Systems must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists requires prior specific permission and/or fee. Request permission to publish from: AIS Administrative Office, P.O. Box 2712 Atlanta, GA, 30301-2712 Attn: Reprints are via e-mail from [email protected]=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

    Factors Affecting the Accessibility of IT Artifacts: A Systematic Review

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    Accessibility awareness and development have improved in the past two decades, but many users still encounter accessibility barriers when using information technology (IT) artifacts (e.g., user interfaces and websites). Current research in information systems and human-computer interaction disciplines explores methods, techniques, and factors affecting the accessibility of IT artifacts for a particular population and provides solutions to address these barriers. However, design realized in one solution should be used to provide accessibility to the widest range of users, which requires an integration of solutions. To identify the factors that cause accessibility barriers and the solutions for users with different needs, a systematic literature review was conducted. This paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge by revealing (1) management- and development-level factors, and (2) user perspective factors affecting accessibility that address different accessibility barriers to different groups of population (based on the International Classification of Functioning by the World Health Organization). Based on these findings, we synthesize and illustrate the factors and solutions that need to be addressed when creating an accessible IT artifact

    Digitally monitoring thermalism health and wellness effects - a conceptual model proposal

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    As life expectancy grows and the population requirements for satisfactory health and wellness levels increases, there is a clear opportunity for the incorporation of alternative techniques and tools for promoting health and preventing disease. One of these tools, is the use of thermal water-based treatments, commonly known as thermalism, as tools to trigger patients’ overall wellness. Despite the collective assumption of the effects of thermalism, there is little to no scientific evidence of these treatments, thus impairing the potential of this activity to become more widespread in society. Thus, with this paper, we present a conceptual model for a non-invasive sensing system based on wearables that can monitor a set of patients’ biomarkers which will serve as the basis for the validation of the effects of thermalism. This system will also serve as a management and operation control tool for thermal SPA managers and technical directors.This work is financed by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within project UIDB/50014/2020.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Explaining Accessibility: Possible Variables in Users’ Abilities, Tasks, and Contexts in IT Artefact Use

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    The interconnection between the two information technology (IT) artefact qualities, accessibility and usability, is challenging to define. Efforts to design and develop accessible IT artefacts should encompass the broadest range of user abilities in identified tasks and contexts. We lack sufficient research on information systems and human-computer interactions that presents a comprehensive model to explain what variables these key components of accessibility contain and how they interconnect. To address this gap in the literature, I draw on theories beyond human-computer interactions, tasks, and contexts to posit the influence of human abilities on IT use by referring to the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF) framework that the World Health Organization developed. In this paper, I theoretically describe accessibility, its components, and their relationships in the IT use context based on which I present an accessibility model. Furthermore, I argue that accessibility is a moderating variable between system features and usability. Therefore, accessibility is a major determinant of user acceptance

    Analyzing the Prospects of Blockchain in Healthcare Industry

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    Deployment of a secured healthcare information is a major challenge in a web based environment. Ehealth services are subjected to same security threats as other services. The purpose of blockchain is to provide a structure and security to the organization data. Healthcare data deals with confidential information. The medical records can be well organized and empower their propagation in a secured manner through the usage of blockchain technology. The study throws light on providing security of health services through blockchain technology. The authors have analysed the various aspects of role of blockchain in healthcare through an extensive literature review. The application of blockchain in covid-19 has also been analysed and discussed in the study. Further application of blockchain in Indian healthcare has been highlighted in the paper. The study provides suggestions for strengthening the healthcare system by blending machine learning, artificial intelligence, big data, IoT with blockchain
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