6,889 research outputs found
Being Online Is Not Enough: State Elections Web Sites
Assesses state elections Web sites on the availability and accessibility of information on voter registration, registration status, and polling places. Lists the ten best and worst sites and suggests ways to make helpful information easy to find and use
HCI in e-Government and e-Democracy
This chapter introduces the application of HCI design processes and design
principles in e-government and e-democracy. We elaborate on HCI design
processes and six HCI design principles in the context of e-government and
e-democracy, including citizen-centered design, usability, accessibility,
access to information, transaction efficiency, and security and privacy. Then,
we present two cases to demonstrate the value of applying the HCI processes and
design principles in developing and deploying e-government and e-democracy.
Finally, we highlight the challenges faced by e-government and e-democracy as
well as the future trends. In conclusion, HCI can help the success of
e-government and e-democracy and their future growth
What did I really vote for? On the usability of verifiable e-voting schemes
E-voting has been embraced by a number of countries, delivering benefits in terms of efficiency and accessibility. End-to-end verifiable e-voting schemes facilitate verification of the integrity of individual votes during the election process. In particular, methods for cast-as-intended verification enable voters to confirm that their cast votes have not been manipulated by the voting client. A well-known technique for effecting cast-as-intended verification is the Benaloh Challenge. The usability of this challenge is crucial because voters have to be actively engaged in the verification process. In this paper, we report on a usability evaluation of three different approaches of the Benaloh Challenge in the remote e-voting context. We performed a comparative user study with 95 participants. We conclude with a recommendation for which approaches should be provided to afford verification in real-world elections and suggest usability improvements
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Evaluating global e-government sites: A view using web diagnostics tools
This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2004 The AuthorsSeveral governments across the world have embraced the digital revolution and continue to take advantage of the information and communication facilities offered by the Internet to offer public services. Conversely, citizensâ awareness and expectations of Internet based online-public-services have also increased in recent times. Although the numbers of the different national e-Government web portals have rapidly increased in the last three years, the success of these portals will largely depend on their accessibility, quality and privacy. This paper reports the results of an
evaluative study of a cross-section of e-Government portals from these three perspectives, using a common set of performance metrics and Web diagnostic engines. Results show that not only are there wide variations in the spectrum of information and services provided by these portals, but that significant work still needs to be undertaken in order to make the portals examples of âbest practiceâ e-Government services
Better Ballots
Literacy tests to gain access to the polls were banned in the United States in 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act.99 But in November 2008, eight years after an election debacle of historic proportions, millions of voters across the United States will face a literacy test of a different sort after they've stepped into the voting booth. Their intended choices may be recorded only if they can understand instructions written at a high reading level, often using legal and election terminology. And they will only be counted if they successfully navigate ballot designs that are needlessly complicated, where candidates for the same offi ce may be listed on multiple columns or pages, or different contests are inconsistently formatted. As we have tried to demonstrate in this report, ballot design and instructions can have a huge impact on election results. We sampled some of the more "high profi le" ballot design disasters over the last several years; this is not a comprehensive analysis of the cost of poor ballot design on elections and votes counted. But, the examples illustrate how dramatically poor ballot design can affect vote totals -- particularly when a number of design fl aws appear on the same ballot. Not surprisingly, when these mistakes affected many ballots (by appearing on a signifi cant percentage of the ballots in large counties like Los Angeles or Palm Beach, or on most of the ballots in a particular state), tens of thousands -- and sometimes hundreds of thousands -- of votes in a single federal or statewide race have been lost. This does not even include the voters who may have been so confused by a ballot design that they cast their ballot for a candidate for whom they did not intend to vote (for obvious reasons, it is far more diffi cult to determine this than to know when a voter failed to successfully cast a vote at all). Better ballot design will make it far more likely that the preferred candidates of all voters will be declared winners of their contests. Palm Beach County 2000 should have been a wake-up call to legislators, election offi cials, and watchdog groups that ensuring good ballot design is a critical election administration issue that needs to be systematically addressed. Unfortunately, for the last eight years, it has continued to be largely ignored. The predictable result has disproportionately affected low-income and elderly voters, and thrown several important elections into turmoil. The good news is that there is still time before November 2008 to ensure that ballot design fl aws do not throw the results of another closely contested race into doubt, as has happened in several federal and state races in the last decade. And unlike changes to equipment (which, there is no question, could make systems more secure, accessible and usable), improving ballot design and instructions is possible for little or no cost, and a relatively small-scale investment of time
Accurator: Nichesourcing for Cultural Heritage
With more and more cultural heritage data being published online, their
usefulness in this open context depends on the quality and diversity of
descriptive metadata for collection objects. In many cases, existing metadata
is not adequate for a variety of retrieval and research tasks and more specific
annotations are necessary. However, eliciting such annotations is a challenge
since it often requires domain-specific knowledge. Where crowdsourcing can be
successfully used for eliciting simple annotations, identifying people with the
required expertise might prove troublesome for tasks requiring more complex or
domain-specific knowledge. Nichesourcing addresses this problem, by tapping
into the expert knowledge available in niche communities. This paper presents
Accurator, a methodology for conducting nichesourcing campaigns for cultural
heritage institutions, by addressing communities, organizing events and
tailoring a web-based annotation tool to a domain of choice. The contribution
of this paper is threefold: 1) a nichesourcing methodology, 2) an annotation
tool for experts and 3) validation of the methodology and tool in three case
studies. The three domains of the case studies are birds on art, bible prints
and fashion images. We compare the quality and quantity of obtained annotations
in the three case studies, showing that the nichesourcing methodology in
combination with the image annotation tool can be used to collect high quality
annotations in a variety of domains and annotation tasks. A user evaluation
indicates the tool is suited and usable for domain specific annotation tasks
Towards a framework to provide citizen-centred guidelines in the design of e-participation platforms
A Systematic Analysis of Accessibility Education Within Computing Disciplines
Accessible technologies improve the usability for all users, including 1 billion people in the world who have a disability. Although there is a demand for accessible technologies, there is currently no requirement for universities to integrate this content within the computing curriculum. A systematic comparison of teaching efficacy is important to effectively prepare future computing professionals with the skills to create accessible technologies.
This dissertation contains a mixed-methods cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of undergraduate Software Engineering and Information Technology studentsâ learning of accessibility. Four teaching conditions were assessed at Rochester Institute of Technology: content lectures, projects, exposure to stakeholders with a disability, and collaboration with a team member who had a disability. Evidence of student learning was obtained through questionnaires, project reports, and interview data. Student learning was quantified by a knowledge of programming techniques, awareness of accessible technologies, and attitudes towards individuals with a disability.
The cross-sectional analysis spanned three years (spring 2016-2019), fourteen courses, and seven distinct professors. We found that students in all conditions gained an increased knowledge of implementation methods. Students who were exposed to a stakeholder with a disability obtained significantly higher scores in their prosocial sympathetic attitudes, awareness of accessible technologies, and knowledge of programming techniques following the course. Students in the other conditions obtained significant changes in only a subset of these measures.
While students in all conditions obtained significantly higher knowledge scores in the short term, only students who had a project or a team member with a disability sustained significantly higher knowledge scores two years after exposure. In interviews, senior-level students revealed that there were multiple factors outside the classroom that dissuaded them from furthering their learning of accessibility. Students mentioned a lack of person-centered topics in major software development processes (e.g., agile, waterfall) and workplace tasks. Without direct reinforcement, students focused on functional software requirements and expressed that accessibility would only be necessary in select front-end development career paths or domains.
While current work in computer accessibility education evaluates learning during, or immediately following, one course, this dissertation provides a systematic comparison of student learning throughout multiple courses and instructors. The findings within this dissertation may be used to inform future curriculum plans and educational initiatives
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