Improving Screencast Accessibility for People with Disabilities: Guidelines and Techniques

Screencast video tutorials are increasingly popular in libraries, but may present access problems for people with disabilities unless specific accessibility features are added during screencast creation. This article reviews existing standards for accessible web-based multimedia and gives guidelines on how to create accessible screencasts based on these standards

Rich Contacts: Corpus-Based Convolution of Audio Contact Gestures for Enhanced Musical Expression

We propose ways of enriching the timbral potential of gestural sonic material captured via piezo or contact microphones, through latency-free convolution of the microphone signal with grains from a sound corpus. This creates a new way to combine the sonic richness of large sound corpora, easily accessible via navigation through a timbral descriptor space, with the intuitive gestural interaction with a surface, captured by any contact microphone. We use convolution to excite the grains from the corpus via the microphone input, capturing the contact interaction sounds, which allows articulation of the corpus by hitting, scratching, or strumming a surface with various parts of the hands or objects. We also show how changes of grains have to be carefully handled, how one can smoothly interpolate between neighbouring grains, and finally evaluate the system against previous attempts

The interaction between voice and appearance in the embodiment of a robot tutor

Robot embodiment is, by its very nature, holistic and understanding how various aspects contribute to the user perception of the robot is non-trivial. A study is presented here that investigates whether there is an interaction effect between voice and other aspects of embodiment, such as movement and appearance, in a pedagogical setting. An on-line study was distributed to children aged 11–17 that uses a modified Godspeed questionnaire. We show an interaction effect between the robot embodiment and voice in terms of perceived lifelikeness of the robot. Politeness is a key strategy used in learning and teaching, and here an effect is also observed for perceived politeness. Interestingly, participants’ overall preference was for embodiment combinations that are deemed polite and more like a teacher, but are not necessarily the most lifelike. From these findings, we are able to inform the design of robotic tutors going forward

Exploring the Design Space of Robot Appearance and Behavior in an Attention-Seeking Living Room Scenario for a Robot Companion

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Middle Level Education Aims for Equity and Inclusion, but Do Our School Websites Meet ADA Compliance?

An often-overlooked component of a middle school website is the necessity for that website to be accessible to those with disabilities, while following the guidelines of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 508 of the Workforce Rehabilitation Act. In support of the belief that support the belief that inclusive education and respect for diversity should be integrated throughout the school, this study investigated the accessibility of middle school websites in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio by selecting a random sample of 150 schools and analyzing their homepages using WAVE (Web Accessibility Versatile Evaluator), which reports accessibility violations by annotating a copy of the page that was evaluated and presenting embedded icons and indicators to disclose breaches with ADA. Out of 150 districts, 54% had errors that need immediate attention and all 150 schools had alerts of likely violations that ranged from alt-text omissions and empty or confusing links to issues with color contrast and keyboard-only navigation. The article proceeds to give practical suggestions for eliminating many of the errors, even for those shareholders with less than sophisticated technological expertise

Automatic generation of audio content for open learning resources

This paper describes how digital talking books (DTBs) with embedded functionality for learners can be generated from content structured according to the OU OpenLearn schema. It includes examples showing how a software transformation developed from open source components can be used to remix OpenLearn content, and discusses issues concerning the generation of synthesised speech for educational purposes. Factors which may affect the quality of a learner's experience with open educational audio resources are identified, and in conclusion plans for testing the effect of these factors are outlined