50,832 research outputs found
Determination and evaluation of web accessibility
The Web is the most pervasive collaborative
technology in widespread use today; however,
access to the web and its many applications cannot
be taken for granted. Web accessibility encompasses
a variety of concerns ranging from societal,
political, and economic to individual, physical, and
intellectual through to the purely technical. Thus,
there are many perspectives from which web
accessibility can be understood and evaluated. In
order to discuss these concerns and to gain a better
understanding of web accessibility, an accessibility
framework is proposed using as its base a layered
evaluation framework from Computer Supported
Co-operative Work research and the ISO standard,
ISO/IEC 9126 on software quality. The former is
employed in recognition of the collaborative nature
of the web and its importance in facilitating
communication. The latter is employed to refine and
extend the technical issues and to highlight the need
for considering accessibility from the viewpoint of
the web developer and maintainer as well as the web
user. A technically inaccessible web is unlikely to be
evolved over time. A final goal of the accessibility
framework is to provide web developers and
maintainers with a practical basis for considering
web accessibility through the development of a set of
accessibility factors associated with each identified
layer
Alternative project delivery in rural Alaska: experiences, quality and claims
Master's Project (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2015The popularity of alternative project delivery systems has expanded beyond the private sector and into the public sector. Alaska embodies unique challenges that may present obstacles while using alternative project delivery systems. This analysis will provide an understanding of alternative project delivery systems in Alaska and how local experiences, quality and claims are affected. Alaska's unique characteristics present both challenges and opportunities for implementing alternative project delivery systems. This report begins with a discussion of experiences from several rural Alaska projects, and how alternative project delivery systems can be utilized. Some impacts that alternative project delivery systems have on quality are then presented, including a perspective on quality and recommendations for achieving customer satisfaction. A treatment of construction claims is then provided, followed by conclusions and recommendations for stakeholders in selecting an appropriate project delivery system. Alternative project delivery systems were researched by means of scholarly literature reviews, professional interviews and seminars. The report of these findings is intended to provide owners and contractors with a concise presentation of the challenges and advantages for using alternative project delivery systems in Alaska
e-Report Generator Supporting Communications and Fieldwork: A Practical Case of Electrical Network Expansion Projects
In this piece of work we present a simple way to incorporate Geographical Information System tools that have been developed using open source software in order to help the different processes in the expansion of the electrical network. This is accomplished by developing a novel fieldwork tool that provides the user with automatically generated enriched e-reports that include information about every one of the involved private real estates in a specific project. These reports are an eco-friendly alternative to paper format, and can be accessed by clients using any kind of personal device with a minimal set of technical requirements
Learner-centred Accessibility for Interoperable Web-based Educational Systems
This paper describes the need for an information model and specifications that support a new strategy for delivering
accessible computer-based resources to learners based on their specific needs and preferences in the circumstances in which they are operating. The strategy augments the universal accessibility of resources model to enable systems to focus on individual learners and their particular accessibility needs and preferences. A set of specifications known as the AccessForAll specifications is proposed
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Adaptations of Escherichia coli strains to oxidative stress are reflected in properties of their structural proteomes.
BACKGROUND:The reconstruction of metabolic networks and the three-dimensional coverage of protein structures have reached the genome-scale in the widely studied Escherichia coli K-12 MG1655 strain. The combination of the two leads to the formation of a structural systems biology framework, which we have used to analyze differences between the reactive oxygen species (ROS) sensitivity of the proteomes of sequenced strains of E. coli. As proteins are one of the main targets of oxidative damage, understanding how the genetic changes of different strains of a species relates to its oxidative environment can reveal hypotheses as to why these variations arise and suggest directions of future experimental work. RESULTS:Creating a reference structural proteome for E. coli allows us to comprehensively map genetic changes in 1764 different strains to their locations on 4118 3D protein structures. We use metabolic modeling to predict basal ROS production levels (ROStype) for 695 of these strains, finding that strains with both higher and lower basal levels tend to enrich their proteomes with antioxidative properties, and speculate as to why that is. We computationally assess a strain's sensitivity to an oxidative environment, based on known chemical mechanisms of oxidative damage to protein groups, defined by their localization and functionality. Two general groups - metalloproteins and periplasmic proteins - show enrichment of their antioxidative properties between the 695 strains with a predicted ROStype as well as 116 strains with an assigned pathotype. Specifically, proteins that a) utilize a molybdenum ion as a cofactor and b) are involved in the biogenesis of fimbriae show intriguing protective properties to resist oxidative damage. Overall, these findings indicate that a strain's sensitivity to oxidative damage can be elucidated from the structural proteome, though future experimental work is needed to validate our model assumptions and findings. CONCLUSION:We thus demonstrate that structural systems biology enables a proteome-wide, computational assessment of changes to atomic-level physicochemical properties and of oxidative damage mechanisms for multiple strains in a species. This integrative approach opens new avenues to study adaptation to a particular environment based on physiological properties predicted from sequence alone
Congenital anomalies in low- and middle-income countries: the unborn child of global surgery.
Surgically correctable congenital anomalies cause a substantial burden of global morbidity and mortality. These anomalies disproportionately affect children in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) due to sociocultural, economic, and structural factors that limit the accessibility and quality of pediatric surgery. While data from LMICs are sparse, available evidence suggests that the true human and financial cost of congenital anomalies is grossly underestimated and that pediatric surgery is a cost-effective intervention with the potential to avert significant premature mortality and lifelong disability
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