Life-long learning on the inclusive web

If our formal education systems were to be graded on achieving the following assignment: “to enable all students to reach their diverse, full potential, so that they can be prosperous, self-guided contributors to our global community,” our systems of education would be flunking. The impact of this failure will exponentially worsen over time, given socio-technical trends. To achieve this crucial learning goal we need more than incremental improvement. We need disruptive innovation. Can the Web be the disruptive impetus and generative scaffolding for an education system that can achieve this goal? How can we both reform and leverage Web accessibility approaches to support this mission? These are the questions explored in this article. Complex adaptive systems, emerging decentralized systems of trust, “small” and “thick” data analytics, Internet of things sensing, open platforms, but most importantly --connected communities, are all recruited in the thought experiment to craft a candidate response

Assisted Interaction for Improving Web Accessibility: An Approach Driven and Tested by Userswith Disabilities

148 p.Un porcentaje cada vez mayor de la población mundial depende de la Web para trabajar, socializar, opara informarse entre otras muchas actividades. Los beneficios de la Web son todavía más cruciales paralas personas con discapacidades ya que les permite realizar un sinfín de tareas que en el mundo físico lesestán restringidas debido distintas barreras de accesibilidad. A pesar de sus ventajas, la mayoría depáginas web suelen ignoran las necesidades especiales de las personas con discapacidad, e incluyen undiseño único para todos los usuarios. Existen diversos métodos para combatir este problema, como porejemplo los sistemas de ¿transcoding¿, que transforman automáticamente páginas web inaccesibles enaccesibles. Para mejorar la accesibilidad web a grupos específicos de personas, estos métodos requiereninformación sobre las técnicas de adaptación más adecuadas que deben aplicarse.En esta tesis se han realizado una serie de estudios sobre la idoneidad de diversas técnicas de adaptaciónpara mejorar la navegación web para dos grupos diferentes de personas con discapacidad: personas conmovilidad reducida en miembros superiores y personas con baja visión. Basado en revisionesbibliográficas y estudios observacionales, se han desarrollado diferentes adaptaciones de interfaces web ytécnicas alternativas de interacción, que posteriormente han sido evaluadas a lo largo de varios estudioscon usuarios con necesidades especiales. Mediante análisis cualitativos y cuantitativos del rendimiento yla satisfacción de los participantes, se han evaluado diversas adaptaciones de interfaz y métodosalternativos de interacción. Los resultados han demostrado que las técnicas probadas mejoran el acceso ala Web y que los beneficios varían según la tecnología asistiva usada para acceder al ordenador

The state of web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities: a rapid evidence assessment

Increased digitisation of day-to-day activities was occurring prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic only accelerated the virtual shift, making web accessibility an urgent issue, especially for marginalised populations. Despite decades of work to develop, refine, and implement web accessibility standards, people with cognitive disabilities regularly experience many barriers to web accessibility. To inform ongoing work to improve web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities, a systematic review was conducted. The main question guiding this review is: what are the state-of-the-art of interventions that support web accessibility for citizens, 9 years of age and up, living with cognitive impairment? A set of 50 search strings were entered into three academic databases: SCOPUS, ProQuest, and Web of Science. Systematic screening procedures narrowed the search returns to a total of 45 included papers. A data analysis revealed themes associated with the lived experiences of people with cognitive disabilities, tools for improving web accessibility, and methodological best practices for involving people with cognitive disabilities in research. These findings have immediate implications for ongoing research and the development of meaningful solutions to the problem of web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Making Spatial Information Accessible on Touchscreens for Users who are Blind and Visually Impaired

Touchscreens have become a de facto standard of input for mobile devices as they most optimally use the limited input and output space that is imposed by their form factor. In recent years, people who are blind and visually impaired have been increasing their usage of smartphones and touchscreens. Although basic access is available, there are still many accessibility issues left to deal with in order to bring full inclusion to this population. One of the important challenges lies in accessing and creating of spatial information on touchscreens. The work presented here provides three new techniques, using three different modalities, for accessing spatial information on touchscreens. The first system makes geometry and diagram creation accessible on a touchscreen through the use of text-to-speech and gestural input. This first study is informed by a qualitative study of how people who are blind and visually impaired currently access and create graphs and diagrams. The second system makes directions through maps accessible using multiple vibration sensors without any sound or visual output. The third system investigates the use of binaural sound on a touchscreen to make various types of applications accessible such as physics simulations, astronomy, and video games

Human Relationships in Higher Education: The Power of Collaboration, Creativity and Openness

We educators may have been obsessed with perfection, expertise, polished experiences and performances too much for too long. Where is the human? Ironed out? This provocative opinion paper is a collection of the authors’ reflections based on experiences, observations, ideas and readings. We invite educators to consider and explore what may help them (re-) connect with their inner selves and others socially, emotionally and cognitively in the context of learning and teaching in HE during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. With reference to a collaborative creative initiative that was implemented under the auspices of the Global OER Graduate Network, the paper aims to instigate a discussion around the importance of building and sustaining effective relationships in HE. These are perceived as the drivers that potentially boost participation and student success using collaboration, creativity and openness. Working in partnership with students, recognising and accepting individuality as well as creating opportunities for connection can support the operationalisation of these reflections in practice

Web Content Management System and accessibility awareness: A comparative study of novice users and accessibility outcomes

Since its creation, the Web has progressively developed and become a vital source of information in every domain and for almost all people. It is crucial to guarantee that the information contained on the Web is available for everyone, especially for people with special needs. Removing accessibility barriers is fundamentally based on tools, skills and support of all contributors, particularly the content creators, to ensure information is navigable and usable in the context of the end users experience. Web Content Management Systems play a significant role in structuring, storing and provision content to the Web and have evolved to address the difficulties of manually coding web pages versus the convenience of manipulating their content without any programing skills. Web Content Management Systems have gradually evolved to contain features and functions that allow content authors to shape their content in ways that address web content accessibility expectations, though only if the content author knows how to use these features to maximum effect. This thesis explores such usage by participants deemed to be novices, in that they have limited technical skills in the context of web coding and have limited expose to Web Content Management Systems or the application/awareness of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). This research places an emphasis on the outcome of these novice users when provided with some basic training and awareness raising of WCAG principles and the use of a modern Web Content Management System. This is explored in the literature as an area of some importance as organisations with significant web presence cannot simply tell their content authors to ‘oh, and make sure it is accessible’ and hope that the end product will somehow achieve that goal without an investment in some form of accessibility education. For web managers and developers in all public sector organisations. “Make sure that all content commissioners and authors are fully trained in the importance of accessible content, and in the means that are made available for them to achieve this . (p. 58) The purpose of this research was to explore to what level the use of accessible Web Content Management System and novice users’ training impacted accessibility outcomes. This study emerged from the widespread role that Web Content Management Systems play in terms of storing and managing web content and the growing usage of these systems by experts or novices at an organisational or personal level. Through a selection process, this study identified a Web Content Management System that had a number of accessibility features, developed some training and ‘awareness raising’ materials and then asked novice users across two groups to apply what they had learned in order to develop an accessible website. The goal of the study was to ascertain if the two groups performed differently according to the training and awareness raising materials they received, and if even basic accessibility outcomes were achievable with just a few hours of training and from what was essentially an accessibility ‘cold start’. The study used a mixed methods approach encompassing three research methods; experimental method, survey method and observational method, to compare qualitative and quantitative data obtained from ‘accessibility awareness’ and ‘accessibility unaware’ participant groups. Thirty university students participated in this research and received accessibility awareness raising sessions, with additional accessibility-related examples for the accessibility awareness group. All participants undertook pre and post-tests that were designed to collect data allowing the researcher to compare the learning performance before and after the participants’ awareness session. At the end of the awareness session, the participants of both groups completed a survey which was designed to provide further data on the participant’s perception of web use and experience, the concept of web accessibility, web content accessibility guidelines, the system used, and their opinion of the accessibility awareness session. Data collected from the survey, pre and post-tests and the recording provided a holistic set of data from which the primary and supporting research questions were addressed. The results of the research indicated that the accessibility awareness group demonstrated measurably better accessibility outcomes than the unawareness group; these results being attributed to the awareness training session, participants’ searching behaviour, time spent on tasks, and effort made to implement accessible features and complete the required tasks. The participants in both groups had some prior knowledge in the use of the Web but limited or no skills in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) or the use of a Web Content Management System. While performing tasks, the participants in the awareness group attempted to apply the accessibility concepts learnt during the training session and spent more time in searching those concepts on the Web in order to provide accessible web page content. Conversely, most of the participants in the unawareness group were concerned by the “look” of the web page, rather than focusing on actual accessible content; they only mimicked the exemplar website they have been provided as an ‘end product’, but did not explore the how and why of accessible content. All the participants at the end of this study were aware of the significance of web accessibility and were favourable to consider it in any future website development they may be involved in. The outcome of the study shows that the use of accessible Web Content Management System with example-based accessibility awareness sessions can lead to improved accessibility outcomes for novice web content authors. This research strongly suggests that even small, focussed and example-based training/awareness raising session can drive an accessibility mindset in web content authors, even those with limited or no technical, accessibility or web authoring experience

Using Social Media Websites to Support Scenario-Based Design of Assistive Technology

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Having representative users, who have the targeted disability, in accessibility studies is vital to the validity of research findings. Although it is a widely accepted tenet in the HCI community, many barriers and difficulties make it very resource-demanding for accessibility researchers to recruit representative users. As a result, researchers recruit non-representative users, who do not have the targeted disability, instead of representative users in accessibility studies. Although such an approach has been widely justified, evidence showed that findings derived from non-representative users could be biased and even misleading. To address this problem, researchers have come up with different solutions such as building pools of users to recruit from. But still, the data is not widely available and needs a lot of effort and resource to build and maintain. On the other hand, online social media websites have become popular in the last decade. Many online communities have emerged that allow online users to discuss health-related subjects, exchange useful information, or provide emotional support. A large amount of data accumulated in such online communities have gained attention from researchers in the healthcare domain. And many researches have been done based on data from social media websites to better understand health problems to improve the wellbeing of people. Despite the increasing popularity, the value of data from social media websites for accessibility research remains untapped. Hence, my work aims to create methods that could extract valuable information from data collected on social media websites for accessibility practitioners to support their design process. First, I investigate methods that enable researchers to effectively collect representative data from social media websites. More specifically, I look into machine learning approaches that could allow researchers to automatically identify online users who have disabilities (representative users). Second, I investigate methods that could extract useful information from user-generated free-text using techniques drawn from the information extraction domain. Last, I explore how such information should be visualized and presented for designers to support the scenario-based design process in accessibility studies

Indoor navigation for the visually impaired : enhancements through utilisation of the Internet of Things and deep learning

Wayfinding and navigation are essential aspects of independent living that heavily rely on the sense of vision. Walking in a complex building requires knowing exact location to find a suitable path to the desired destination, avoiding obstacles and monitoring orientation and movement along the route. People who do not have access to sight-dependent information, such as that provided by signage, maps and environmental cues, can encounter challenges in achieving these tasks independently. They can rely on assistance from others or maintain their independence by using assistive technologies and the resources provided by smart environments. Several solutions have adapted technological innovations to combat navigation in an indoor environment over the last few years. However, there remains a significant lack of a complete solution to aid the navigation requirements of visually impaired (VI) people. The use of a single technology cannot provide a solution to fulfil all the navigation difficulties faced. A hybrid solution using Internet of Things (IoT) devices and deep learning techniques to discern the patterns of an indoor environment may help VI people gain confidence to travel independently. This thesis aims to improve the independence and enhance the journey of VI people in an indoor setting with the proposed framework, using a smartphone. The thesis proposes a novel framework, Indoor-Nav, to provide a VI-friendly path to avoid obstacles and predict the user s position. The components include Ortho-PATH, Blue Dot for VI People (BVIP), and a deep learning-based indoor positioning model. The work establishes a novel collision-free pathfinding algorithm, Orth-PATH, to generate a VI-friendly path via sensing a grid-based indoor space. Further, to ensure correct movement, with the use of beacons and a smartphone, BVIP monitors the movements and relative position of the moving user. In dark areas without external devices, the research tests the feasibility of using sensory information from a smartphone with a pre-trained regression-based deep learning model to predict the user s absolute position. The work accomplishes a diverse range of simulations and experiments to confirm the performance and effectiveness of the proposed framework and its components. The results show that Indoor-Nav is the first type of pathfinding algorithm to provide a novel path to reflect the needs of VI people. The approach designs a path alongside walls, avoiding obstacles, and this research benchmarks the approach with other popular pathfinding algorithms. Further, this research develops a smartphone-based application to test the trajectories of a moving user in an indoor environment