The use of speech recognition technology by people living with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: a scoping review

More than 80% of people living with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (plwALS) develop difficulties with their speech, affecting communication, self-identity and quality of life. Automatic speech recognition technology (ASR) is becoming a common way to interact with a broad range of devices, to find information and control the environment. ASR can be problematic for people with acquired neurogenic motor speech difficulties (dysarthria). Given that the field is rapidly developing, a scoping review is warranted

Interactive voice response system and eye-tracking interface in assistive technology for disabled

Abstract. The development of ICT has been very fast in the last few decades and it is important that everyone can benefit from this progress. It is essential for designing user interfaces to keep up on this progress and ensure the usability and accessibility of new innovations. The purpose of this academic literature review has been to study the basics of multimodal interaction, emphasizing on context with multimodal assistive technology for disabled people. From various modalities, interactive voice response and eye-tracking were chosen for analysis. The motivation for this work is to study how technology can be harnessed for assisting disabled people in daily life

ARIA A11Y ANALYZER: Helping Integrate Accessibility into Websites

Today, nearly 1 in 5 people have a disability that affects their daily life. These varied disabilities can include blindness, low vision or mobility impairments. When interacting with web content, users with such disabilities rely heavily on various assistive technologies, such as screen readers, keyboard, voice recognition software, etc. Here, assistive technologies are software applications or hardware devices that allows users with disabilities to interact with web and software applications. For instance, a screen reader is a software application that navigates through the page and speaks the content to users. Web accessibility is defined as the ability for assistive technology users to interact and perceive information on a webpage. For example, screen readers are used by users who are blind to read the content on a webpage and to interact with its elements, for example by activating a button. However, this is not always straightforward and easy. Accessibility is generally not a priority for many publishers and developers when building a product. This can lead to difficulties in understanding and perceiving content on the page for assistive technology users. For instance, a retail website without alternative descriptions for images is difficult for users who are blind to “look” for a product and get its information. This can result in the user leaving the website without making a purchase. Until recently, users with disabilities were not part of the usability testing phase. Due to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the numerous lawsuits that are being filed on major companies and educational institutions, digital accessibility awareness is growing and more web content designers and developers are building websites with accessibility in mind. In order to help test the accessibility of a webpage, a number of online applications are 4 available. This project reviews three such major applications that test for accessibility, and proposes to build an application prototype called ARIA Accessibility Analyzer (AAA). The main aim of AAA is to allow users to perform accessibility tests and remove accessibility barriers in an effective way. AAA is a Chrome browser extension that users can download to manage accessibility tests. These users can include developers, designers, Quality Assurance testers, students and professors. We finally conducted surveys and interviews to understand limitations of these existing technologies and to determine if these limitations have been satisfied in AAA application

Evaluating the Usability of Automatically Generated Captions for People who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

The accuracy of Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) technology has improved, but it is still imperfect in many settings. Researchers who evaluate ASR performance often focus on improving the Word Error Rate (WER) metric, but WER has been found to have little correlation with human-subject performance on many applications. We propose a new captioning-focused evaluation metric that better predicts the impact of ASR recognition errors on the usability of automatically generated captions for people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing (DHH). Through a user study with 30 DHH users, we compared our new metric with the traditional WER metric on a caption usability evaluation task. In a side-by-side comparison of pairs of ASR text output (with identical WER), the texts preferred by our new metric were preferred by DHH participants. Further, our metric had significantly higher correlation with DHH participants' subjective scores on the usability of a caption, as compared to the correlation between WER metric and participant subjective scores. This new metric could be used to select ASR systems for captioning applications, and it may be a better metric for ASR researchers to consider when optimizing ASR systems.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, published in ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17

Implementing web accessibility to an existing web application

Web accessibility is becoming more and more important as societies around the world rely more and more on digital services. It enables the services to be used by many different kinds of users. It is starting to become a norm in public sector organisations, which sets up expectations and demands for web applications. When you have an existing educational web application like Sanako Connect, how do you go about implementing web accessibility into it? That topic is explored through four research questions. First, as different countries and regions have regulations regarding web accessibility, and there are different web accessibility guidelines, what accessibility guidelines should be followed? Secondly, how those guidelines could be transformed into more concrete requirements? The research questions become more practical from here on out. The third research question asks how to modify the development process so that accessibility will be thought of in future development and revisions of the software. This is vital because the application is in a constant flux of new features and refactoring, which means that web accessibility should be an integral part of development. The final question is, what are the challenges and solutions when implementing the requirements to an existing application. Background into web applications and web accessibility is provided to find answers to the first two questions. The last two questions are explored through the starting phases of a web accessibility implementation project. The implementation project will also validate answers for the first two questions, as the guidelines and requirements will guide the development process and implementation. Even though the implementation details are unique to this one product, the challenges and solutions are general enough that they support previously discussed approaches to web accessibility. The most important takeaway is that there rarely are valid arguments for not including web accessibility into new projects from the start. Including it afterwards is always the harder path to take

Conversational affective social robots for ageing and dementia support

Socially assistive robots (SAR) hold significant potential to assist older adults and people with dementia in human engagement and clinical contexts by supporting mental health and independence at home. While SAR research has recently experienced prolific growth, long-term trust, clinical translation and patient benefit remain immature. Affective human-robot interactions are unresolved and the deployment of robots with conversational abilities is fundamental for robustness and humanrobot engagement. In this paper, we review the state of the art within the past two decades, design trends, and current applications of conversational affective SAR for ageing and dementia support. A horizon scanning of AI voice technology for healthcare, including ubiquitous smart speakers, is further introduced to address current gaps inhibiting home use. We discuss the role of user-centred approaches in the design of voice systems, including the capacity to handle communication breakdowns for effective use by target populations. We summarise the state of development in interactions using speech and natural language processing, which forms a baseline for longitudinal health monitoring and cognitive assessment. Drawing from this foundation, we identify open challenges and propose future directions to advance conversational affective social robots for: 1) user engagement, 2) deployment in real-world settings, and 3) clinical translation

Proceedings of the 1st joint workshop on Smart Connected and Wearable Things 2016

These are the Proceedings of the 1st joint workshop on Smart Connected and Wearable Things (SCWT'2016, Co-located with IUI 2016). The SCWT workshop integrates the SmartObjects and IoWT workshops. It focusses on the advanced interactions with smart objects in the context of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), and on the increasing popularity of wearables as advanced means to facilitate such interactions

Assistive systems for quality assurance by context-aware user interfaces in health care and production

Rüther S. Assistive systems for quality assurance by context-aware user interfaces in health care and production. Bielefeld: Universitätsbibliothek Bielefeld; 2014.The reprocessing of medical devices is an essential procedure to keep hospitals operational. Workers at the Central Sterilization Supply Department (CSSD) clean, disinfect and sterilize medical devices and have to obligate to the manifold of legal and hygiene prescriptions. Failures during reprocessing can endanger patients' safety and increase costs. The process of decontamination has rich sources of failures because of the complexity of hygiene, medical devices and regulatory specifications. The benefits of an assistance system helping workers in preventing failures are therefore obvious and crucial. New interaction technologies such as augmented reality can potentially help workers in the CSSD to avoid failures during the reprocessing of medical devices. Challenging requirements for the application of new interaction technology within the CSSD arise through process complexity, legislation, integration and hygiene restrictions. This thesis proposes an assistance system that supports the worker in the unclean area of a CSSD with respect to these requirements. The system provides a user interface for context-aware worker guidance and collection of process relevant data from the worker. The proposed interaction mechanism of 'virtual touches' fulfills the hygiene requirements and is realized by an adapted workspace which is equipped with a depth camera and a projected user interface. The 'business process modeling notation 2.0 (BPMN 2.0)' standard is utilized to define process models that control the workflow, coordinate the system's components and maintain a database for quality assurance and worker guidance. In addition to an in depth description of the system, an evaluation with two user studies and interviews with CSSD domain experts are conducted throughout this thesis. The results reveal a high capability for failure avoidance during the reprocessing of medical devices without delaying the process compared to today's CSSDs. Additionally, CSSD experts appraise a high practical relevance and underline the feasibility of the underlying concepts for the CSSD domain. The concepts of the process integration, the standardized modeling of the workflow and workers' tasks as well as the context-aware interface are also helpful, relevant and applicable in the domain of manual assembly processes. Thus, this thesis describes, how the system can be transfered to the domain of manual production. The presentation of a prototype at a renowned international industrial fair and the accompanying feedback from manufacturing experts underline the scalability and the portability of the proposed assistance system to the production domain, which is a result of a component based system architecture utilizing process models for the coordination of computational devices and human workers