Ambient Multimodality: an Asset for Developing Universal Access to the Information Society

International audienceThe paper tries to point out the benefits that can be derived from research advances in the implementation of concepts such as ambient intelligence (AmI) and ubiquitous or pervasive computing for promoting Universal Access (UA) to the Information Society, that is, for contributing to enable everybody, especially Physically Disabled (PD) people, to have easy access to all computing resources and information services that the coming worldwide Information Society will soon make available to the general public. Following definitions of basic concepts relating to multimodal interaction, the significant contribution of multimodality to developing UA is briefly argued. Then, a short state of the art in AmI research is presented. In the last section we bring out the potential contribution of advances in AmI research and technology to the improvement of computer access for PD people. This claim is supported by the following observations: (i) most projects aiming at implementing AmI focus on the design of new interaction modalities and flexible multimodal user interfaces which may facilitate PD users' computer access ; (ii) targeted applications will support users in a wide range of daily activities which will be performed simultaneously with supporting computing tasks; therefore, users will be placed in contexts where they will be confronted with similar difficulties to those encountered by PD users; (iii) AmI applications being intended for the general public, a wide range of new interaction devices and flexible processing software will be available, making it possible to provide PD users with human-computer facilities tailored to their specific needs at reasonable expense.