How Well Do Ontario Library Web Sites Meet New Accessibility Requirements?

New changes to Ontario law will require library web sites to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). This study evaluates 64 Ontario university, college, and public library web sites to see how well they comply with WCAG 2.0 guidelines at present. An average of 14.75 accessibility problems were found per web page. The most common problems included invalid html, poor color contrast, incorrect form controls and labels, missing alt text, bad link text, improper use of headings, using html to format pages, using absolute units of measure, and issues with tables and embedded objects

Semi-automated mobile television interactive application generation based on XHTML and Java ME

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 11/02/2011.Mobile Digital TV (MDTV), the hybrid of Digital Television (DTV) and mobile devices (such as mobile phones), has introduced a new way for people to watch DTV and has brought new opportunities for development in the DTV industry. Nowadays, the development of the next generation MDTV service has progressed in terms of both hardware layers and software, with interactive services/applications becoming one of the future MDTV service trends. However, current MDTV interactive services still lack in terms of attracting the consumers and the service creation and implementation process relies too much on commercial solutions, resulting in most parts of the process being proprietary. In addition, this has increased the technical demands for developers as well as has increased substantially the cost of producing and maintaining MDTV services. In light of the aforementioned situation, the Thesis has contributed to this field, by proposing an innovative MDTV service creation and consumption system based on XHTML and Java ME. On the head-end it introduces a semi-automatic creation mechanism to facilitate a less technical and more efficient interactive service creation process. This enables designers and creative individuals to be actively involved in the MDTV service creation process and to develop interactive-rich MDTV service. On the client-end it employs an open-source software environment as the interactive service MDTV consumption platform, rendering the MDTV service implementation process as less proprietary as possible. Furthermore, the Thesis offers a discussion on the different MDTV interactive application models currently used and based on the proposed software, a novel MDTV service presentation method is further introduced and adopted instead of the Rich Media and ECMAScript based methods. Finally, a series of qualitative testing procedures have been implemented with regards to conducting an essential evaluation on the operability of the proposed software system

The VoiceApp System: Speech Technologies to Access the Semantic Web

Proceedings of: 14th Conference of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence, CAEPIA 2011, La Laguna, Spain, November 7-11, 2011Maximizing accessibility is not always the main objective in the design of web applications, specially if it is concerned with facilitating access for disabled people. In this paper we present the VoiceApp multimodal dialog system, which enables to access and browse Internet by means of speech. The system consists of several modules that provide different user experiences on the web. Voice Dictionary allows the multimodal access to the Wikipedia encyclopedia, Voice Pronunciations has been developed to facilitate the learning of new languages by means of games with words and images, whereas Voice Browser provides a fast and effective multimodal interface to the Google web search engine. All the applications in the system can be accessed multimodally using traditional graphic user interfaces such as keyboard and mouse, and/or by means of voice commands. Thus, the results are accessible also for motorhandicapped and visually impaired users and are easier to access by any user in small hand-held devices where graphical interfaces are in some cases difficult to employ.Research funded by projects CICYT TIN 2008-06742-C02-02/TSI, CICYT TEC 2008-06732-C02-02/TEC, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485), and DPS 2008-07029-C02-02.Publicad

Developing a Web-Based Location Navigation System in the Context of Covenant University

More often than not, people are faced with a number of challenges while considering the environment where they are vis-a-vis locating the exact place they are going at a particular instance. A location-based navigation system, however, helps out by providing direction to the desired location through the use of subjective rating. However, users preferring a combination of maps and photographs of the desired places render such location-based navigation systems inadequate. This paper addresses these challenges by presenting a web- based destinations „ directions system that assists users locate their desired destinations on the campus by navigating their way using the map provided by the audio navigator as the navigator tells the users their locations and how to get to their destinations on the campus

SERVICE-BASED INTERACTIVE WORKFLOWS FOR MOBILE ENVIRONMENTS

Since the use of mobile devices spreads increasingly, mobile systems also play a major role for distributed business processes. In such scenarios, extending workflow management support to mobile systems offers potential to seamlessly integrate field staff into business processes, even if executing devices are disconnected from the company\u27s server. However, the heterogeneity of current mobile systems still requires complex device-specific descriptions of user interfaces to integrate manual tasks. Therefore, this paper presents an abstract and modality-independent description model to support the development and execution of interactive mobile workflows and a corresponding prototype realization based on a service-oriented execution module

Customization of Web applications through an intelligent environment exploiting logical interface descriptions

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Interacting with Computers. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Interacting with Computers, 20, 1 (2008) DOI:10.1016/j.intcom.2007.07.007Customization of Web-based applications is often considered a designer skill rather than an end-user need. However, there is an ongoing shift to end-user-centred technology, and even users with poor or no skill in Web-based languages may feel the need to customize Web applications according to their preferences. Although Web authoring environments have an increasing number of features, the challenge of providing end-users with the ability to easily customize entire Web applications still remains unsolved. In this paper, we propose an intelligent approach to customizing Web-based applications. Customizations rules are automatically inferred by the system from changes that users supply as examples. They remain as long-term knowledge that can be applied to support future interactions, thus minimizing the amount of authoring that end-users need to do for this purpose. In order to better understand the implications of the user's modifications, they are analysed using the logical descriptions of the corresponding Web pages.The work reported in this paper is supported by the European Training Network ADVISES (Analysis Design and Validation of Interactive Safety-critical and Error-tolerant Systems), funded through the European Commission. Project number EU HPRN-CT-2002-00288

Using EPUB 3 and the open web platform for enhanced presentation and machine-understandable metadata for digital comics

Various methods are needed to extract information from current (digital) comics. Furthermore, the use of different (proprietary) formats by comic distribution platforms causes an overhead for authors. To overcome these issues, we propose a solution that makes use of the EPUB 3 specification, additionally leveraging the Open Web Platform to support animations, reading assistance, audio and multiple languages in a single format, by using our JavaScript library comicreader.js. We also provide administrative and descriptive metadata in the same format by introducing a new ontology: Dicera. Our solution is complementary to the current extraction methods, on the one hand because they can help with metadata creation, and on the other hand because the machine-understandable metadata alleviates their use. While the reading system support for our solution is currently limited, it can offer all features needed by current comic distribution platforms. When comparing comics generated by our solution to EPUB 3 textbooks, we observed an increase in file size, mainly due to the use of images. In future work, our solution can be further improved by extending the presentation features, investigating different types of comics, studying the use of new EPUB 3 extensions, and by incorporating it in digital book authoring environments

eMath 3.0: building blocks for a social and semantic Web for online mathematics & elearning

In this paper we present recent developments in content markup for mathematics, and a corresponding software stack that functions as an enabling technology for a social and semantic web for the STEM disciplines. We show the potential of this technology in two eMath 3.0 applications: PlanetMathRedux, a re-implementation of the mathematical encyclopedia PlanetMath.org, and PantaRheiRedux, a community reader for course materials. These applications indicate both present and potential uses for this software as a basis for eLearning applications in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics through the addition of suitable pedagogies

Evaluating the development of wearable devices, personal data assistants and the use of other mobile devices in further and higher education institutions

This report presents technical evaluation and case studies of the use of wearable and mobile computing mobile devices in further and higher education. The first section provides technical evaluation of the current state of the art in wearable and mobile technologies and reviews several innovative wearable products that have been developed in recent years. The second section examines three scenarios for further and higher education where wearable and mobile devices are currently being used. The three scenarios include: (i) the delivery of lectures over mobile devices, (ii) the augmentation of the physical campus with a virtual and mobile component, and (iii) the use of PDAs and mobile devices in field studies. The first scenario explores the use of web lectures including an evaluation of IBM's Web Lecture Services and 3Com's learning assistant. The second scenario explores models for a campus without walls evaluating the Handsprings to Learning projects at East Carolina University and ActiveCampus at the University of California San Diego . The third scenario explores the use of wearable and mobile devices for field trips examining San Francisco Exploratorium's tool for capturing museum visits and the Cybertracker field computer. The third section of the report explores the uses and purposes for wearable and mobile devices in tertiary education, identifying key trends and issues to be considered when piloting the use of these devices in educational contexts