Improving Deaf Accessibility in Remote Usability Testing

For studies involving Deaf participants in United States, remote usability testing has several potential advantages over face-to-face testing, including convenience, lower cost and the ability to recruit participants from diverse geographic regions. However, current technologies force Deaf participants to use English instead of their preferred language, which is American Sign Language (ASL). A new remote testing technology allows researchers to conduct studies exclusively in ASL at a lower cost than face-toface testing. The technology design facilitates open-ended questions and is reconfigurable for use in a variety of studies. Results from usability tests of the tool are encouraging and a fullscale study is underway to compare this approach to face-to-face testing

Accessibility in Health related Virtual Learning Environments

Supporting patients and informal carers is an essential task in managing chronic diseases. Many of these diseases are either directly linked to disabilities or are age related and, thus, also strongly correlated with potential disabilities. Furthermore, as the population ages it is becoming more and more common to give an old person with a set of mild disabilities acting as informal carer of another person with some type of chronic disease. Support material and professional help can be provided through the use of an eLearning platform. These platforms are usually known as Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). People with disabilities, linked to physical and/or cognitive impairments can obtain an extraordinary advantage from access to eLearning but, in practice, they find important barriers when the Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) and contents are not delivered in the suitable adapted forms according to their needs and preferences. All VLEs are supported by a set of different technological layers. Those layers can interfere with the final user gaining access to such adapted resources. Conflicts with user agents, assistive technologies and the delivery format of the resources are the most common problems. The accessibility of current VLEs, a mature technology, provides an interesting case study regarding the types of problems that can be encountered by users in current web application

Persona-Based Design for Personal Health Information Management Systems

The field that represents the promotion of ICT for supporting, improving or enabling the health and healthcare systems, is widely known as e-health. Various studies ([1]and [2]) have concluded that ehealth is effective in terms of: significant cost reductions for the patients and the health system, increased health service efficiency, increased technical quality and usability and increased user satisfaction. Numerous guidelines exist for supporting the user-interface designs of e-health systems for all the different types of users. However, relying solely on user interface design guidelines is not enough [3]. One of the possible ways to provide for good usability and acceptance of an e-learning system is to involve the target users of the e-learning services throughout the entire design and development processes [4]. The approach of design which actively involves users in the design and development process is known as a participatory or cooperative design [5]. Participatory design is more effective when users are continuously involved throughout the development process – from the conceptualization phases until the very end i.e. testing the new technology together with the users. However, this can be both time- and cost-consuming. In the situations where price and fast delivery are critical, researchers suggest using expert reviews [6] and [7]. Expert usability reviews are based solely on the usability expert’s extensive experience, mainly form usability testing. They are based on well-known and recognized usability guidelines and not on expert’s self-invented ones. Expert reviews do not involve end-users. In order to make experts think like end users, Molich suggests persona- and scenario-based expert reviews [8]. Persona- and scenario-based expert reviews help experts see the product or system from the perspective of the real users and the context of usage. Persona-based usability expert review takes into consideration the type of the end-user who is interacting with the system or the product. This type of usability expert reviews consider end-users familiarity of the terminology, information architecture, navigation system and the graphical user interface design of the system end-users interact with

SignQUOTE: A Remote Testing Facility for Eliciting Signed Qualitative Feedback

Sign synthesis is still an evolving technology and improving it requires the elicitation of qualitative feedback from users. Current options for acquiring qualitative feedback are limited. Face-toface tests conducted in sign language are expensive. On the other hand, remote tests do not use the preferred language of the test participants. A new tool, SignQUOTE, (Signed Qualitative Usability Online Testing Environment) is a configurable, cross platform remote testing system based entirely on sign language. It includes an innovative method for capturing qualitative feedback in sign language via webcam. In a comparison study, participants viewed animations of American Sign Language and gave suggestions for improvement. The authors conducted a study using SignQUOTE that presented stimuli identical to those used in a previously-conducted face-to-face study. When comparing the two approaches, the authors found results that are consistent with previous comparison studies of remote and face-to-face testing. SignQUOTE comes with a Test Designer that allows researchers to customize tests. The software is available as open source. Conference proceedings from the Second International Workshop on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology (SLTAT)-2011, University of Dundee, UK, 24-26 October 24 - 26, 2011

Remote Usability Testing Using Eyetracking

Abstract. In the paper we present a low cost method of using eyetracking to perform remote usability tests on users. Remote usability testing enables to test users in their natural environment. Eyetracking is one of the most popular techniques for usability testing in the laboratory environment. We decided to try to use this technique in remote tests. We used standard web camera with freeware software. Our experiment showed that such method is not perfect, but it could be a good addition to the standard remote tests, and a foundation for further development

e-Accessibility: Making the Web Accessible to the Visually Impaired Persons

Accessibility is the possibility of any person to make use of all the benefits of society, including the use of the Internet. Graphical are an obstacle for visually impaired persons to access the Internet, so they need a support technology capable of capturing interfaces and making them accessible. Interfaces should be designed so that when accessed by support technologies they continue to be friendly. For a site to be accessible to blind persons it is necessary that the information be reproduced by means of an “equivalent” textual description, capable of transmitting the same information as the visual resources. The present study is aimed at identifying and defining usability guidance compliant with accessibility W3C directives that can facilitate the interaction between visually impaired and the Internet and still guarantee sites with understandable navigation content. Towards this end an exploratory study was conducted, comprised of a field study and interviews with various visually disabled people from the Instituto Benjamin Constant, reference center in Brazil for the education and re-education of visually impaired persons, in order to get to know visually disabled users better. Through the understanding acquired, different types of impositions and limits that these users are subject to have been identified, enabling a better perception of their needs and special abilities. The impaired user-machine interaction were observed and analyzed, which enabled the identification of aspects that could contribute to the accessibility of sites, with emphasis on facilitating the access of those visually impaired to the Web

Features of effective E-commerce web accessibility for the partially blind users

Web accessibility means that anyone at any time with the help of internet should be able to access any website and get full understanding of it and fully interact with it, if necessary. It is an extensive subject referred to by various numbers of writers in the past, pertaining it to other concerns though, this particular project will explain web accessibility problems faced a specific disability group (partially blind) users. The purpose of this project is to find measures of the effective accessibility of E-commerce websites for partially blind users, to propose solution to those problems and to examine that the proposed model provides improved satisfaction. The findings and analytics will be done by conducting face to face interview with the group of partially blind users

Developing Dynamic Audio Navigation UIs to Pinpoint Elements in Tactile Graphics

Access to complex graphical information is essential when connecting blind and visually impaired (BVI) people with the world. Tactile graphics readers enable access to graphical data through audio-tactile user interfaces (UIs), but these have yet to mature. A challenging task for blind people is locating specific elements–areas in detailed tactile graphics. To this end, we developed three audio navigation UIs that dynamically guide the user’s hand to a specific position using audio feedback. One is based on submarine sonar sounds, another relies on the target’s coordinate plan x and y-axis, and the last uses direct voice instructions. The UIs were implemented in the Tactonom Reader device, a new tactile graphic reader that enhances swell paper graphics with pinpointed audio explanations. To evaluate the effectiveness of the three different dynamic navigation UIs, we conducted a within-subject usability test that involved 13 BVI participants. Beyond comparing the effectiveness of the different UIs, we observed and recorded the interaction of the visually impaired participants with the different navigation UI to further investigate their behavioral patterns during the interaction. We observed that user interfaces that required the user to move their hand in a straight direction were more likely to provoke frustration and were often perceived as challenging for blind and visually impaired people. The analysis revealed that the voice-based navigation UI guides the participant the fastest to the target and does not require prior training. This suggests that a voice-based navigation strategy is a promising approach for designing an accessible user interface for the blind