Making Bank Notes Accessible for Canadians Living with Blindness or Low Vision

The ability to conduct financial transactions using bank notes is crucial to independent living. Yet this can pose significant challenges for individuals who are blind or partially sighted. This article discusses the Bank of Canada's efforts over the past 30 years to meet the accessibility needs of a specific subset of the population--Canadians living with blindness or vision loss. It also reports the findings of expert and user assessments of the suite of accessibility features on the current series of bank notes and shares plans for the next series.

Personalised automated assessments

Consider an evaluator, or an assessor, who needs to assess a large amount of information. For instance, think of a tutor in a massive open online course with thousands of enrolled students, a senior program committee member in a large peer review process who needs to decide what are the final marks of reviewed papers, or a user in an e-commerce scenario where the user needs to build up its opinion about products evaluated by others. When assessing a large number of objects, sometimes it is simply unfeasible to evaluate them all and often one may need to rely on the opinions of others. In this paper we provide a model that uses peer assessments to generate expected assessments and tune them for a particular assessor. Furthermore, we are able to provide a measure of the uncertainty of our computed assessments and a ranking of the objects that should be assessed next in order to decrease the overall uncertainty of the calculated assessments.This work is supported by the CollectiveMind project (funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, under grant number TEC2013-49430-EXP) and the PRAISE project (funded by the European Commission, under grant number 318770).Peer reviewe

REDESIGN USER INTERFACE APLIKASI NGAJI.AI BERBASIS MOBILE MENGGUNAKAN METODE DESIGN THINKING

Ngaji.AI is a mobile-based application that makes it possible to learn the Koran very flexibly, wherever and whenever we can use it to learn the Koran. This application is supported by artificial intelligence (AI) which provides direct and accurate assessments of how to recite Al-Quran verses properly and correctly and this application has been released on the Google Playstore platform and has been downloaded by more than 5 thousand. The Ngaji.AI application is faced with a crucial challenge, after direct observation of children and through the results of previous user input on Playstore, most of the input from users states that it needs to improve the User Interface (UI) design to make it easier to operate for children. The application of the Design Thinking method is an approach that prioritizes creativity and deep understanding of users and the problems they face and is indeed suitable for developing UI/UX of an application. Testing using the System Usability Scale (SUS) in the first test before the redesign got an average score of 50.25 and after the redesign got a significant score of 83.75. This reflects a significant increase in the level of satisfaction and ease for children in learning to recite the Koran on the Ngaji.Ai application

Can the shift from needs-led to outcomes-focused assessment in health and social care deliver on policy priorities?

Assessment, planning and review are at the heart of the provision of services and support in health and social care in the community, providing key means through which professionals interact with people using their services. These interactions provide opportunities for relationship building, with evidence that involving the person in identifying their priorities and required support can itself improve outcomes. At the same time, professionals use assessment to assess eligibility for support, and assessment has also increasingly become a mechanism for data gathering, to inform a range of requirements at local and national level including planning, commissioning, inspection and performance management. Despite attempts to move assessment from being service-led to person-centred, meeting such a broad range of objectives and requirements can create tensions at the front line, influencing both how interactions are conducted, and the resulting decisions. More recently, there has been an increasing emphasis on outcomes for individuals using health and social care services, including a shift from needs-led to outcomes-focused assessment. This paper considers a recent literature review about shared health and social care assessment, including emerging evidence from the implementation of outcomes-focused assessment in the UK. It concludes that there are promising signs that the recent shift to outcomes-focused assessment might resolve longstanding tensions around assessment, delivering on person-centred objectives and resulting in more efficient and effective use of resources

Rationed Care: Assessing the Support Needs of Informal Carers in English Social Services Authorities

The passing of the Carers (Recognition and Services Act) 1995 was a step forward in trying to ensure that people who provide informal care to disabled, sick or elderly relatives or friends are properly recognised and properly supported. The Carers Act gave informal carers the right to an assessment of their own needs, and this article is based on a study into the impact of the legislation in four local authority social services departments. It is argued that the vision of supporters of the Carers Act, namely to achieve real benefits for many carers, has yet to be realised. The analysis draws on Klein et al.’s (1996) framework of service rationing strategies to demonstrate that decisions about priority setting and different forms of rationing of social care took place at three different levels: national government, local authority and front-line practitioner. Evidence is presented to show that some carers chose to impose rationing on themselves by reducing their demands. The article concludes with comments on the implications of rationing decisions for policy and practice

A study of interface support mechanisms for interactive information retrieval

Advances in search technology have meant that search systems can now offer assistance to users beyond simply retrieving a set of documents. For example, search systems are now capable of inferring user interests by observing their interaction, offering suggestions about what terms could be used in a query, or reorganizing search results to make exploration of retrieved material more effective. When providing new search functionality, system designers must decide how the new functionality should be offered to users. One major choice is between (a) offering automatic features that require little human input, but give little human control; or (b) interactive features which allow human control over how the feature is used, but often give little guidance over how the feature should be best used. This article presents a study in which we empirically investigate the issue of control by presenting an experiment in which participants were asked to interact with three experimental systems that vary the degree of control they had in creating queries, indicating which results are relevant in making search decisions. We use our findings to discuss why and how the control users want over search decisions can vary depending on the nature of the decisions and the impact of those decisions on the user's search

The Individual Budgets Pilot Projects: Impact and Outcomes for Carers

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Student-Centered Learning: Functional Requirements for Integrated Systems to Optimize Learning

The realities of the 21st-century learner require that schools and educators fundamentally change their practice. "Educators must produce college- and career-ready graduates that reflect the future these students will face. And, they must facilitate learning through means that align with the defining attributes of this generation of learners."Today, we know more than ever about how students learn, acknowledging that the process isn't the same for every student and doesn't remain the same for each individual, depending upon maturation and the content being learned. We know that students want to progress at a pace that allows them to master new concepts and skills, to access a variety of resources, to receive timely feedback on their progress, to demonstrate their knowledge in multiple ways and to get direction, support and feedback from—as well as collaborate with—experts, teachers, tutors and other students.The result is a growing demand for student-centered, transformative digital learning using competency education as an underpinning.iNACOL released this paper to illustrate the technical requirements and functionalities that learning management systems need to shift toward student-centered instructional models. This comprehensive framework will help districts and schools determine what systems to use and integrate as they being their journey toward student-centered learning, as well as how systems integration aligns with their organizational vision, educational goals and strategic plans.Educators can use this report to optimize student learning and promote innovation in their own student-centered learning environments. The report will help school leaders understand the complex technologies needed to optimize personalized learning and how to use data and analytics to improve practices, and can assist technology leaders in re-engineering systems to support the key nuances of student-centered learning