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Ethics and Design in the Brazilian Context
Often driven by practical and immediate requirements, more and more people are incorporating technology into a variety of aspects of their lives, often without reflecting on the consequences of using them. On the other hand, studies on interactive system development that lead to behavioral change have been gaining ground on the agenda of large HCI conferences. This movement brings to the forefront the fundamental issues of ethics in design and technology use. A designerâs intentions, when directing certain actions or behaviors, are not always explicit or desired by the stakeholders affected by the use of the technology. Systems that induce an undesired purchase, or even those that use conditioning strategies to cause a behavioral change are examples of such intentions. The challenge proposed is therefore about the relationship between design and personal freedom in a way that these technology users do not become victims, either passively or submissively, of the effects of its use. This advance allows for the redefinition of the relationship between man and technology, and the application of new forms of designing and developing interactive systems that take into account the ethical aspects of this relationship
Culture-based artefacts to inform ICT design: foundations and practice
Cultural aspects frame our perception of the world and direct the many different ways people interact with things in it. For this reason, these aspects should be considered when designing technology with the purpose to positively impact people in a community. In this paper, we revisit the foundations of culture aiming to bring this concept in dialogue with design. To inform design with cultural aspects, we model reality in three levels of formality: informal, formal, and technical, and subscribe to a systemic vision that considers the technical solution as part of a more complex social system in which people live and interact. In this paper, we instantiate this theoretical and methodological view by presenting two case studies of technology design in which culture-based artefacts were employed to inform the design process. We claim that as important as including issues related to culture in the ICT design agendaâfrom the conception to the development, evaluation, and adoption of a technologyâis the need to support the design process with adequate artefacts that help identifying cultural aspects within communities and translating them into sociotechnical requirements. We argue that a culturally informed perspective on design can go beyond an informative analysis, and can be integrated with the theoretical and methodological framework used to support design, throughout the entire design process
Digital accessibility across Kuwaitâs software development landscape
When designing and developing digital services it is important to consider equity and inclusion. However, in practice adopting and sustaining the development of accessible digital solutions has always been challenging, more so in countries that are relatively new to the concept of universal design, and physical and digital accessibility, and where legal sanctions are not yet established. This work investigates the software development scene in the State of Kuwait and analyses the responses of computing professionals regarding their skills, best practices, and procurement of accessible tech, and to their level of awareness towards people with disabilities. The findings reveal a low level of awareness of disability and digital accessibility amongst tech professionals. They also highlight a lack of available guidance, time management, training, legal enforcement, and coverage of fundamental concepts in higher education
Web Content Management System and accessibility awareness: A comparative study of novice users and accessibility outcomes
Since its creation, the Web has progressively developed and become a vital source of information in every domain and for almost all people. It is crucial to guarantee that the information contained on the Web is available for everyone, especially for people with special needs. Removing accessibility barriers is fundamentally based on tools, skills and support of all contributors, particularly the content creators, to ensure information is navigable and usable in the context of the end users experience. Web Content Management Systems play a significant role in structuring, storing and provision content to the Web and have evolved to address the difficulties of manually coding web pages versus the convenience of manipulating their content without any programing skills. Web Content Management Systems have gradually evolved to contain features and functions that allow content authors to shape their content in ways that address web content accessibility expectations, though only if the content author knows how to use these features to maximum effect. This thesis explores such usage by participants deemed to be novices, in that they have limited technical skills in the context of web coding and have limited expose to Web Content Management Systems or the application/awareness of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). This research places an emphasis on the outcome of these novice users when provided with some basic training and awareness raising of WCAG principles and the use of a modern Web Content Management System. This is explored in the literature as an area of some importance as organisations with significant web presence cannot simply tell their content authors to âoh, and make sure it is accessibleâ and hope that the end product will somehow achieve that goal without an investment in some form of accessibility education.
For web managers and developers in all public sector organisations. âMake sure that all content commissioners and authors are fully trained in the importance of accessible content, and in the means that are made available for them to achieve this . (p. 58)
The purpose of this research was to explore to what level the use of accessible Web Content Management System and novice usersâ training impacted accessibility outcomes. This study emerged from the widespread role that Web Content Management Systems play in terms of storing and managing web content and the growing usage of these systems by experts or novices at an organisational or personal level. Through a selection process, this study identified a Web Content Management System that had a number of accessibility features, developed some training and âawareness raisingâ materials and then asked novice users across two groups to apply what they had learned in order to develop an accessible website. The goal of the study was to ascertain if the two groups performed differently according to the training and awareness raising materials they received, and if even basic accessibility outcomes were achievable with just a few hours of training and from what was essentially an accessibility âcold startâ.
The study used a mixed methods approach encompassing three research methods; experimental method, survey method and observational method, to compare qualitative and quantitative data obtained from âaccessibility awarenessâ and âaccessibility unawareâ participant groups. Thirty university students participated in this research and received accessibility awareness raising sessions, with additional accessibility-related examples for the accessibility awareness group. All participants undertook pre and post-tests that were designed to collect data allowing the researcher to compare the learning performance before and after the participantsâ awareness session. At the end of the awareness session, the participants of both groups completed a survey which was designed to provide further data on the participantâs perception of web use and experience, the concept of web accessibility, web content accessibility guidelines, the system used, and their opinion of the accessibility awareness session. Data collected from the survey, pre and post-tests and the recording provided a holistic set of data from which the primary and supporting research questions were addressed.
The results of the research indicated that the accessibility awareness group demonstrated measurably better accessibility outcomes than the unawareness group; these results being attributed to the awareness training session, participantsâ searching behaviour, time spent on tasks, and effort made to implement accessible features and complete the required tasks. The participants in both groups had some prior knowledge in the use of the Web but limited or no skills in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) or the use of a Web Content Management System. While performing tasks, the participants in the awareness group attempted to apply the accessibility concepts learnt during the training session and spent more time in searching those concepts on the Web in order to provide accessible web page content. Conversely, most of the participants in the unawareness group were concerned by the âlookâ of the web page, rather than focusing on actual accessible content; they only mimicked the exemplar website they have been provided as an âend productâ, but did not explore the how and why of accessible content. All the participants at the end of this study were aware of the significance of web accessibility and were favourable to consider it in any future website development they may be involved in.
The outcome of the study shows that the use of accessible Web Content Management System with example-based accessibility awareness sessions can lead to improved accessibility outcomes for novice web content authors. This research strongly suggests that even small, focussed and example-based training/awareness raising session can drive an accessibility mindset in web content authors, even those with limited or no technical, accessibility or web authoring experience
Assessment of Web Content Accessibility Levels in Spanish Official Online Education Environments
Diversity-based designing, or the goal of ensuring that web-based information is accessible to as many diverse users as possible, has received growing international acceptance in recent years, with many countries introducing legislation to enforce it. This paper analyses web content accessibility levels in Spanish education portals according to the international guidelines established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Additionally, it suggests the calculation of an inaccessibility rate as a tool for measuring the degree of non-compliance with WAI Guidelines 2.0 as well as illustrating the significant gap that separates people with disabilities from digital education environments (with a 7.77% average). A total of twenty-one educational web portals with two different web depth levels (42 sampling units) were assessed for this purpose using the automated analysis tool Web Accessibility Test 2.0 (TAW, for its initials in Spanish). The present study reveals a general trend towards non-compliance with the technical accessibility recommendations issued by the W3C-WAI group (97.62% of the websites examined present mistakes in Level A conformance). Furthermore, despite the increasingly high number of legal and regulatory measures about accessibility, their practical application still remains unsatisfactory. A greater level of involvement must be assumed in order to raise awareness and enhance training efforts towards accessibility in the context of collective Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), since this represents not only a necessity but also an ethical, social, political and legal commitment to be assumed by society
From skepticism to mutual support: towards a structural change in the relations between participatory budgeting and the information and communication technologies?
Until three years ago, ICT Technologies represented a main âsubordinate clauseâ within the âgrammarâ of Participatory Budgeting (PB), the tool made famous by the experience of Porto Alegre and today expanded to more than 1400 cities across the planet. In fact, PB â born to enhance deliberation and exchanges among citizens and local institutions â has long looked at ICTS as a sort of âpollution factorâ which could be useful to foster transparency and to support the spreading of information but could also lead to a lowering in quality of public discussion, turning its âinstantaneityâ into âimmediatism,â and its âtime-saving accessibilityâ into âreductionismâ and laziness in facing the complexity of public decision-making through citizensâ participation. At the same time, ICTs often regarded Participatory Budgeting as a tool that was too-complex and too-charged with ideology to cooperate with. But in the last three years, the barriers which prevented ICTs and Participatory Budgeting to establish a constructive dialogue started to shrink thanks to several experiences which demonstrated that technologies can help overcome some âcognitive injusticesâ if not just used as a means to âmake simplerâ the organization of participatory processes and to bring âlarger numbersâ of intervenients to the process. In fact, ICTs could be valorized as a space adding âdiversityâ to the processes and increasing outreach capacity. Paradoxically, the experiences helping to overcome the mutual skepticism between ICTs and PB did not come from the centre of the Global North, but were implemented in peripheral or semiperipheral countries (Democratic Republic of Congo, Brazil, Dominican Republic and Portugal in Europe), sometimes in cities where the âdigital divideâ is still high (at least in terms of Internet connections) and a significant part of the population lives in informal settlements and/or areas with low indicators of âconnection.â Somehow, these experiences were able to demystify the âscary monolithicismâ of ICTs, showing that some instruments (like mobile phones, and especially the use of SMS text messaging) could grant a higher degree of connectivity, diffusion and accountability, while other dimensions (which could risk jeopardizing social inclusion) could be minimized through creativity. The paper tries to depict a possible panorama of collaboration for the near future, starting from descriptions of some of the above mentioned âturning-pointâ experiences â both in the Global North as well as in the Global South
Accessibility Lab #1: Audio Cues
An increasingly large number of people with disabilities are using software nowadays. However, much of the software created today is inaccessible to people with disabilities. The WorldWideWeb Consortium (W3C) and many other well-known companies have provided the best practices of creating accessible software. Unfortunately, developers either struggle to sympathize with accessibility issues, do not know the best practices of accessibility design, or both. Hence, there is a need to teach developers about accessibility and how to create accessible software. Unfortunately, accessibility is not widely taught in education.
The Accessibility Learning Labs (ALL) were created to address the limitation of readily available, high-quality accessibility educational material. The aim of the labs is to help students understand accessibility issues, increase awareness of the need to create accessible software, and empathize with problems that people with disabilities go through. This research focuses on the first accessibility learning lab utilizing audio cues and teaching students about people with hearing impairments
Computer Entertainment Technologies for the Visually Impaired: An Overview
Over the last years, works related to accessible technologies have increased both in number and in quality. This work presents a series of articles which explore different trends in the field of accessible video games for the blind or visually impaired. Reviewed articles are distributed in four categories covering the following subjects: (1) video game design and architecture, (2) video game adaptations, (3) accessible games as learning tools or treatments and (4) navigation and interaction in virtual environments. Current trends in accessible game design are also analysed, and data is presented regarding keyword use and thematic evolution over time. As a conclusion, a relative stagnation in the field of human-computer interaction for the blind is detected. However, as the video game industry is becoming increasingly interested in accessibility, new research opportunities are starting to appear
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