43,737 research outputs found
A FRAMEWORK FOR INTELLIGENT VOICE-ENABLED E-EDUCATION SYSTEMS
Although the Internet has received significant attention in recent years, voice is still the most convenient and natural way of communicating between human to human or
human to computer. In voice applications, users may have different needs which will require the ability of the system to reason, make decisions, be flexible and adapt to
requests during interaction. These needs have placed new requirements in voice application development such as use of advanced models, techniques and methodologies which take into account the needs of different users and environments. The ability of a system to behave close to human reasoning is often mentioned as one of the major requirements for the development of voice applications.
In this paper, we present a framework for an intelligent voice-enabled e-Education application and an adaptation of the framework for the development of a prototype Course Registration and Examination (CourseRegExamOnline) module. This study is a preliminary report of an ongoing e-Education project containing the following modules: enrollment, course registration and examination, enquiries/information, messaging/collaboration, e-Learning and library.
The CourseRegExamOnline module was developed using VoiceXML for the voice user interface(VUI), PHP for the web user interface (WUI), Apache as the middle-ware and MySQL database as back-end. The system would offer dual access modes using the VUI and WUI.
The framework would serve as a reference model for developing voice-based e-Education applications. The e-Education system when fully developed would meet the
needs of students who are normal users and those with certain forms of disabilities such as visual impairment, repetitive strain injury (RSI), etc, that make reading and
writing difficult
Modeling an ontology on accessible evacuation routes for emergencies
Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. However, this is a challenging goal for researchers and professionals due to the diverse pool of prospective users, e.g. people with disabilities as well as other vulnerable groups. Moreover, in the event of an emergency situation, many people could become vulnerable because of exceptional circumstances such as stress, an unknown environment or even visual impairment (e.g. fire causing smoke). Within this scope, a crucial activity is to notify affected people about safe places and available evacuation routes. In order to address this need, we propose to extend an ontology, called SEMA4A (Simple EMergency Alert 4 [for] All), developed in a previous work for managing knowledge about accessibility guidelines, emergency situations and communication technologies. In this paper, we introduce a semi-automatic technique for knowledge acquisition and modeling on accessible evacuation routes. We introduce a use case to show applications of the ontology and conclude with an evaluation involving several experts in evacuation procedures. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
Mobile Learning Applications Audit
While mobile learning (m-learning) applications have proven their value in educational activities, there is a need to measure their reliability, accessibility and further more their trustworthiness. Mobile devices are far more vulnerable then classic computers and present inconvenient interfaces due to their size, hardware limitations and their mobile connectivity. Mobile learning applications should be audited to determine if they should be trusted or not, while multimedia contents like automatic speech recognition (ASR) can improve their accessibility. This article will start with a brief introduction on m-learning applications, then it will present the audit process for m-learning applications, it will iterate their specific security threats, it will define the ASR process, and it will elaborate how ASR can enhance accessibility of these types of applications.IT Audit, Software Testing, Penetration Testing, Mobile Applications, Multimedia, Automatic Speech Recognition
Joining hands: developing a sign language machine translation system with and for the deaf community
This paper discusses the development of an automatic machine translation (MT) system for translating spoken language text into signed languages (SLs). The motivation for our work is the improvement of accessibility to airport information announcements for D/deaf and hard of hearing people. This paper demonstrates the involvement of Deaf colleagues and members of the D/deaf community in Ireland in three areas of our research: the choice of a domain for automatic translation that has a practical use for the D/deaf community; the human translation of English text into Irish Sign Language (ISL) as well as advice on ISL grammar and linguistics; and the importance of native ISL signers as manual evaluators of our translated output
Mobile recommender apps with privacy management for accessible and usable technologies
The paper presents the preliminary results of an ongoing survey of the use of computers and mobile devices, interest in recommender apps and knowledge and concerns about privacy issues amongst English and Italian speaking disabled people. Participants were found to be regular users of computers and mobile devices for a range of applications. They were interested in recommender apps for household items, computer software and apps that met their accessibility and other requirements. They showed greater concerns about controlling access to personal data of different types than this data being retained by the computer or mobile device. They were also willing to make tradeoffs to improve device performance
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The design of an Image Bank
Image Banks, which are collections of images with associated data and captions, are a valuable teaching tool for Astronomy courses at the Open University. Until now web pages have been created for each image and its associated information. This paper examines how a database, front-ended by a multimedia authoring tool, can provide a much more flexible and maintainable architecture for producing Image Banks. Accessibility issues are discussed
Software System for Vocal Rendering of Printed Documents
The objective of this paper is to present a software system architecture developed to render the printed documents in a vocal form. On the other hand, in the paper are described the software solutions that exist as software components and are necessary for documents processing as well as for multimedia device controlling used by the system. The usefulness of this system is for people with visual disabilities that can access the contents of documents without that they be printed in Braille system or to exist in an audio form.accessibility, TWAIN, OCR, TTS, SAPI
Stressing the Boundaries of Mobile Accessibility
Mobile devices gather the communication capabilities as no other gadget.
Plus, they now comprise a wider set of applications while still maintaining
reduced size and weight. They have started to include accessibility features
that enable the inclusion of disabled people. However, these inclusive efforts
still fall short considering the possibilities of such devices. This is mainly
due to the lack of interoperability and extensibility of current mobile
operating systems (OS). In this paper, we present a case study of a
multi-impaired person where access to basic mobile applications was provided in
an applicational basis. We outline the main flaws in current mobile OS and
suggest how these could further empower developers to provide accessibility
components. These could then be compounded to provide system-wide inclusion to
a wider range of (multi)-impairments.Comment: 3 pages, two figures, ACM CHI 2013 Mobile Accessibility Worksho
On the Design of Ambient Intelligent Systems in the Context of Assistive Technologies
The design of Ambient Intelligent Systems (AISs) is discussed in the
context of assistive technologies. The main issues include ubiquitous communications,
context awareness, natural interactions and heterogeneity, which are
analyzed using some examples. A layered architecture is proposed for heterogeneous
sub-systems integration with three levels of interactions that may be
used as a framework to design assistive AISs.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC2001-1868-C0
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