Accessibility Validation with RAVEN

ABSTRACT Testing is, for most, a necessary evil in the software life cycle. One very important form of testing is the evaluation of software products according to mandated criteria or guidelines such as those that specify level of accessibility. Such evaluations can be quite tedious, especially if they must be done manually and applied consistently to each and every component of an application. The use of assistive technologies like screen readers to demonstrate the compliance of a software product to a set of regulations is time-consuming, error-prone, and expensive. Validation tools that can perform such evaluations are becoming more popular as integrated development environments become more sophisticated but, in the area of accessibility validation, they are sorely lacking if not nonexistent. This paper introduces the IBM Rule-based Accessibility Validation Environment, an Eclipse-based tool for inspecting and validating Java rich-client GUIs for accessibility using non-invasive, semi-to fullyautomatic, rule-based validation and inspection

Enabling Mobility for Persons with Major Lower-Limb Amputations: A Model-based Study of the Impact of Digital Prosthetics Service Provision on Mobility Outcomes

Revised version. Minor formatting errors corrected.The World Health Organization has predicted a doubling in the global population for persons with amputation by 2050 because of steady population growth, ageing populations, and climbing rates chronic conditions such as peripheral arterial disease and diabetes mellitus. Without proper and timely prosthetic interventions, amputees with major lower-limb loss experience adverse mobility outcomes, including the loss of independence, lowered quality of life, and decreased life expectancy. Yet, a vast majority of amputees still do not have access to prosthetic services given the present capacity constraints, lack of proximity to services, high costs and poor healthcare coverage. Today, the entry of digital technology to the prosthetics services industry (e.g., 3D-printed sockets) is touted to be a plausible solution to this problem. This thesis aims to assess the impact of digital prosthetics on the amputee mobility outcomes – specifically, the proportion of amputees who successfully regain mobility from using a prosthesis and the health-economic consequences of such mobility. Using the system dynamics approach, this study presents a computational simulation model ¬– representing the patient-care continuum and digital prosthetics system – that provides a feedback-rich causal theory of how digital prosthetics impacts amputee mobility outcomes over time. In general, this study has found that with sufficient resources for market formation and capacity expansion for digital prosthetics services, substantial improvements to mobility outcomes for amputees can be expected. In doing so, it serves as proof-of-concept for the viability of scaling digital prosthetics for enabling mobility and bolstering the social impact of providing a prosthesis. Based on the high-leverage policy levers found in the system, this study further discusses the model-based insights that could inform policy design for alleviating the barriers to access and enhancing the health-economic outcomes of prosthetics care.Master's Thesis in System DynamicsGEO-SD351INTL-KMDINTL-MEDINTL-SVINTL-JUSINTL-HFINTL-PSYKINTL-MNMASV-SYSD

Does Managerial Training have any impact on the performance of MSE Managers? Empirical evidence from Ghana

Received the best full paper award in the performance management trackAdopting the human capital theory as a lens, this study investigates the impact of managerial training on the performance of the managers of Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) in Ghana. The study uses primary data collected from 506 MSEs who are clients of Financial Non- Governmental Organisations (FNGOs) in the Volta Region of Ghana. Managerial Training (MT) and Performance has been measured on a five-point Likert scale anchored by strongly disagree (1) and strongly agree (5). MT has been measured using 4 main constructs namely, training content, training efficiency, training frequency and training accessibility whilst performance was measured using 12 items. The study controlled for business age, industry category, manager’s educational level and gender. The study shows that managerial training content, efficiency, frequency, and accessibility are statistically significant in explaining performance among MSE managers in Ghana. Secondly, the study also shows that industry category, managers educational level, and business age influences the performance of managers. However, gender is statistically insignificant and does not have any impact on the performance of MSE managers in Ghana. The study, therefore, argues for the delivery of managerial training which is content-rich, efficient, frequent and accessible to MSE managers to develop their managerial capabilities (Fatoki, 2011; Newman et al., 2014)

ORCA-SPOT: An Automatic Killer Whale Sound Detection Toolkit Using Deep Learning

Large bioacoustic archives of wild animals are an important source to identify reappearing communication patterns, which can then be related to recurring behavioral patterns to advance the current understanding of intra-specific communication of non-human animals. A main challenge remains that most large-scale bioacoustic archives contain only a small percentage of animal vocalizations and a large amount of environmental noise, which makes it extremely difficult to manually retrieve sufficient vocalizations for further analysis – particularly important for species with advanced social systems and complex vocalizations. In this study deep neural networks were trained on 11,509 killer whale (Orcinus orca) signals and 34,848 noise segments. The resulting toolkit ORCA-SPOT was tested on a large-scale bioacoustic repository – the Orchive – comprising roughly 19,000 hours of killer whale underwater recordings. An automated segmentation of the entire Orchive recordings (about 2.2 years) took approximately 8 days. It achieved a time-based precision or positive-predictive-value (PPV) of 93.2% and an area-under-the-curve (AUC) of 0.9523. This approach enables an automated annotation procedure of large bioacoustics databases to extract killer whale sounds, which are essential for subsequent identification of significant communication patterns. The code will be publicly available in October 2019 to support the application of deep learning to bioaoucstic research. ORCA-SPOT can be adapted to other animal species

Quality of life in aphasia: Greek adaptation of the stroke and aphasia quality of life scale - 39 item (SAQOL-39)

AIM: Health-related quality of life (HRQL) measures are becoming increasingly popular in evaluating health care interventions and services. The stroke and aphasia quality of life scale-39 item (SAQOL-39) is an English questionnaire that measures HRQL in people with aphasia. There is currently no measure to assess the HRQL of Greek-speaking people with aphasia. This study began the cross-cultural adaptation of the SAQOL-39 into Greek, by translating and linguistically validating the instrument. METHODS: The Mapi approach to linguistic validation was followed. The SAQOL-39 was forward translated into Greek and back-translated into English. The pilot version was produced by comparing the forward and backward translations. The resulting instrument was then reviewed by an expert professional and pilot tested with a sample of 10 people with aphasia. RESULTS: Sixty-seven percent of back-translated items matched those in the original instrument. Only 20% of the items in the consensus version needed amendments for the pilot version. The pilot testing showed that the SAQOL-39 had good accessibility (no missing data), acceptability (maximum endorsement frequencies, MEF=or>70%; 9 out of 10 participants had no difficulty) and content validity (8 participants had nothing to add to the questionnaire). CONCLUSIONS: By employing the Mapi approach to linguistic validation, a close matching between the original and the Greek version of the SAQOL-39 was ensured. The Greek SAQOL-39 is accessible and acceptable to people with aphasia. Further research is needed on the psychometric properties of the Greek SAQOL-39 and on its appropriateness as a clinical outcome measure

Towards the construction of an educational model for dual career parenting:the EMPATIA project

The European Union supports innovative transnational cooperation and practices between Member States on relevant issues in the field of sports, including a balanced combination of higher education and sporting careers of talented and elite athletes (dual career). Ten European academic and sport institutions aimed to construct an educational programme for parents supporting the dual career of their elite athletes. The innovative methodological approach to the co-construction of a parent education based on evidence and eminence of the actual needs of parents in relation to the age, sex, sport typology, competition and academic levels of student-athletes is described. Finally, the potentially far-reaching effects of digital technologies on adult learning and the innovative aspects of a multi-lingual and demand-driven dual career parenting education are envisaged.</p

Organizational knowledge transfer through creation, mobilization and diffusion: A case analysis of InTouch within Schlumberger

There is a paucity of theory for the effective management of knowledge transfer within large organisations. Practitioners continue to rely upon ‘experimental’ approaches to address the problem. This research attempts to reduce the gap between theory and application, thereby improving conceptual clarity for the transfer of knowledge. The paper, through an in-depth case analysis conducted within Schlumberger, studies the adoption of an intranet-based knowledge management (KM) system (called InTouch) to support, strategically align and transfer knowledge resources. The investigation was undertaken through the adoption of a robust methodological approach (abductive strategy) incorporating the role of technology as an enabler of knowledge management application. Consequently, the study addressed the important question of translating theoretical benefits of KM into practical reality. The research formulates a set of theoretical propositions which are seen as key to the development of an effective knowledge based infrastructure. The findings identify 30 generic attributes that are essential to the creation, mobilisation and diffusion of organisational knowledge. The research makes a significant contribution to identifying a theoretical and empirically based agenda for successful intranet-based KM which will be of benefit to both the academic and practitioner communities. The paper also highlights and proposes important areas for further research

Evaluating accessibility, usability and interoperability of genome-scale metabolic models for diverse yeasts species

Metabolic network reconstructions have become an important tool for probing cellular metabolism in the field of systems biology. They are used as tools for quantitative prediction but also as scaffolds for further knowledge contextualization. The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae was one of the first organisms for which a genome-scale metabolic model (GEM) was reconstructed, in 2003, and since then 45 metabolic models have been developed for a wide variety of relevant yeasts species. A systematic evaluation of these models revealed that-despite this long modeling history-the sequential process of tracing model files, setting them up for basic simulation purposes and comparing them across species and even different versions, is still not a generalizable task. These findings call the yeast modeling community to comply to standard practices on model development and sharing in order to make GEMs accessible and useful for a wider public

Hydromorphological classification of Slovenian rivers

This paper provides an overview of hydromorphological and related classifications of rivers in Slovenia and elsewhere. The Rosgen classification is presented in greater detail; it was used in the study as the basis for developing the first Slovenian hydromorphological classification. A hydromorphological survey form was designed to classify rivers and used in the office and field survey of hydromorphological variables in the 95 river sections selected in Slovenia. In the river sections studied, hydromorphological types were identified by analyzing the co-occurrence of selected hydromorphological variables. This method was used to identify 10 hydromorphological types, for which the main hydromorphological features are presented in this paper. Based on the results of the first hydromorphological classification of Slovenian rivers, guidelines are provided for future work