User Interface Abstraction for enabling TV set based Inclusive Access to the Information Society

199 p.The television (TV) set is present in most homes worldwide, and is the most used Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Despite its large implantation in the market, the interactive services consumption on TV set is limited. This thesis focuses on overcoming the following limiting factors: (i) limited Human Computer Interaction and (ii) lack of considering user’s real life context in the digital television (dTV) service integration strategy. Making interactive services accessible to TV set’s large user base, and especially to the most vulnerable ones, is understood as the path to integrate the mankind with the information society. This thesis explores the use of user interface abstraction technologies to reach the introduced goals. The main contributions of this thesis are: (i) an approach to enable the universally accessible remote control of the TV set, (ii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible interactive services through TV sets, and (iii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible services in the TV user’s real life context. We have implemented the contributing approaches for different use cases, and we have evaluated them with real users, achieving good results

Developing an interactive overview for non-visual exploration of tabular numerical information

This thesis investigates the problem of obtaining overview information from complex tabular numerical data sets non-visually. Blind and visually impaired people need to access and analyse numerical data, both in education and in professional occupations. Obtaining an overview is a necessary first step in data analysis, for which current non-visual data accessibility methods offer little support. This thesis describes a new interactive parametric sonification technique called High-Density Sonification (HDS), which facilitates the process of extracting overview information from the data easily and efficiently by rendering multiple data points as single auditory events. Beyond obtaining an overview of the data, experimental studies showed that the capabilities of human auditory perception and cognition to extract meaning from HDS representations could be used to reliably estimate relative arithmetic mean values within large tabular data sets. Following a user-centred design methodology, HDS was implemented as the primary form of overview information display in a multimodal interface called TableVis. This interface supports the active process of interactive data exploration non-visually, making use of proprioception to maintain contextual information during exploration (non-visual focus+context), vibrotactile data annotations (EMA-Tactons) that can be used as external memory aids to prevent high mental workload levels, and speech synthesis to access detailed information on demand. A series of empirical studies was conducted to quantify the performance attained in the exploration of tabular data sets for overview information using TableVis. This was done by comparing HDS with the main current non-visual accessibility technique (speech synthesis), and by quantifying the effect of different sizes of data sets on user performance, which showed that HDS resulted in better performance than speech, and that this performance was not heavily dependent on the size of the data set. In addition, levels of subjective workload during exploration tasks using TableVis were investigated, resulting in the proposal of EMA-Tactons, vibrotactile annotations that the user can add to the data in order to prevent working memory saturation in the most demanding data exploration scenarios. An experimental evaluation found that EMA-Tactons significantly reduced mental workload in data exploration tasks. Thus, the work described in this thesis provides a basis for the interactive non-visual exploration of a broad range of sizes of numerical data tables by offering techniques to extract overview information quickly, performing perceptual estimations of data descriptors (relative arithmetic mean) and managing demands on mental workload through vibrotactile data annotations, while seamlessly linking with explorations at different levels of detail and preserving spatial data representation metaphors to support collaboration with sighted users

Future bathroom: A study of user-centred design principles affecting usability, safety and satisfaction in bathrooms for people living with disabilities

Research and development work relating to assistive technology 2010-11 (Department of Health) Presented to Parliament pursuant to Section 22 of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 197

スマートフォンを用いた視覚障碍者向け移動支援システムアーキテクチャに関する研究

学位の種別: 課程博士審査委員会委員 : （主査）東京大学教授 坂村 健, 東京大学教授 越塚 登, 東京大学教授 暦本 純一, 東京大学教授 中尾 彰宏, 東京大学教授 石川 徹University of Tokyo(東京大学

A Haptic Study to Inclusively Aid Teaching and Learning in the Discipline of Design

Designers are known to use a blend of manual and virtual processes to produce design prototype solutions. For modern designers, computer-aided design (CAD) tools are an essential requirement to begin to develop design concept solutions. CAD, together with augmented reality (AR) systems have altered the face of design practice, as witnessed by the way a designer can now change a 3D concept shape, form, color, pattern, and texture of a product by the click of a button in minutes, rather than the classic approach to labor on a physical model in the studio for hours. However, often CAD can limit a designer’s experience of being ‘hands-on’ with materials and processes. The rise of machine haptic1 (MH) tools have afforded a great potential for designers to feel more ‘hands-on’ with the virtual modeling processes. Through the use of MH, product designers are able to control, virtually sculpt, and manipulate virtual 3D objects on-screen. Design practitioners are well placed to make use of haptics, to augment 3D concept creation which is traditionally a highly tactile process. For similar reasoning, it could also be said that, non-sighted and visually impaired (NS, VI) communities could also benefit from using MH tools to increase touch-based interactions, thereby creating better access for NS, VI designers. In spite of this the use of MH within the design industry (specifically product design), or for use by the non-sighted community is still in its infancy. Therefore the full benefit of haptics to aid non-sighted designers has not yet been fully realised. This thesis empirically investigates the use of multimodal MH as a step closer to improving the virtual hands-on process, for the benefit of NS, VI and fully sighted (FS) Designer-Makers. This thesis comprises four experiments, embedded within four case studies (CS1-4). Case study 1and2 worked with self-employed NS, VI Art Makers at Henshaws College for the Blind and Visual Impaired. The study examined the effects of haptics on NS, VI users, evaluations of experience. Case study 3 and4, featuring experiments 3 and4, have been designed to examine the effects of haptics on distance learning design students at the Open University. The empirical results from all four case studies showed that NS, VI users were able to navigate and perceive virtual objects via the force from the haptically rendered objects on-screen. Moreover, they were assisted by the whole multimodal MH assistance, which in CS2 appeared to offer better assistance to NS versus FS participants. In CS3 and 4 MH and multimodal assistance afforded equal assistance to NS, VI, and FS, but haptics were not as successful in bettering the time results recorded in manual (M) haptic conditions. However, the collision data between M and MH showed little statistical difference. The thesis showed that multimodal MH systems, specifically used in kinesthetic mode have enabled human (non-disabled and disabled) to credibly judge objects within the virtual realm. It also shows that multimodal augmented tooling can improve the interaction and afford better access to the graphical user interface for a wider body of users

Human-powered smartphone assistance for blind people

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