Design of Web-based Tools to Study Blind People?s Touch-Based Interaction with Smartphones

Nowadays touchscreen smartphones are the most common kind of mobile devices. However, gesture-based interaction is a difficult task for most visually impaired people, and even more so for blind people. This difficulty is compounded by the lack of standard gestures and the differences between the main screen reader platforms available on the market. Therefore, our goal is to investigate the differences and preferences in touch gesture performance on smartphones among visually impaired people. During our study, we implemented a web-based wireless system to facilitate the capture of participants? gestures. In this paper we present an overview of both the study and the system used

A Proposal for the Inclusion of Accessibility Criteria in the Publishing Workflow of Images in Biomedical Academic Articles

AbstractIn spite of the importance of visual content in academic publishing, biomedical articles do not offer accessible images, mainly because of the lack of text alternatives. According to a process-oriented accessibility philosophy, this article proposes the use of image-related texts, such as captions or mentions, as text alternatives of images, since they are solutions based on the current practices of authors of biomedical images. We also present two tools created to guide authors in writing comprehensive text alternatives. The aim of this proposal is to increase the opportunities of an actual application of accessibility principles within the biomedical academic publishing

An effective services framework for sharing educational resources

Nowadays, the growing number of software tools to support e-learning and the data they rely upon are valuable resources, supporting different aspects of the complex learning and teaching processes, including designing learning content, delivering learning activities, and evaluating students’ learning performance. However, sharing these educational resources efficiently and effectively is a challenge: there are many resources, these have not been described accurately and in general they do not interoperate, and it is common for the tools to rely on different technologies. This thesis explores a solution – a novel educational services framework – to improve the sharing of current e-resources, by applying the latest service technologies in the context of higher education. Our findings suggest that the proposed framework is effective to deal with the technical and educational issues in resource discovery, interoperability and reusability, however, there are still technical challenges remaining for implementing this service framework. This research is divided into 3 phases. The first phase investigates the sharing of elearning resources through a literature survey, and identifies limitations on current developments. In the second phase, the current problems relating to resource sharing are addressed by a proposed educational service framework, which contains both educational and technical components. Through a case study, nine e-learning services and their dataflows are identified. To determine the technical components of the framework, a novel Educational Service Architecture is proposed, which allows resources to be better described, structured and connected, by following the principles of discoverability, interoperability and reusability in service technologies. In the third phase, part of the framework is implemented and evaluated by two studies. In the first study, users’ experiences were collected via a simulation experiment, to compare the effectiveness of a service prototype with that of the use of current technologies. During the second part of the evaluation, technical challenges for implementing the services framework were identified via a case study, involving the implementation of another service prototype

The implementation of web accessibility standards by Dutch municipalities:Factors of resistance and support

There are laws and regulations in place requiring public sector bodies to adopt and implement international standards for web accessibility. Municipalities in the Netherlands have collectively adopted these standards. However, they often seem unable to fully implement web accessibility standards even if the law requires them to and they are actively pursuing it. Based on existing models, literature, questionnaires and extensive audits of the websites of participating municipalities, this dissertation identifies processes that support or resist implementation of the standards within the specific context of web accessibility for local government websites. Awareness of these processes is important for stakeholders willing to implement web accessibility standards. The result is a set of recommendations for local governments that help them identify processes that support or resist the actual implementation of web accessibility standards. This not only contributes to the accessibility of the web for people with disabilities, it may also be helpful for the implementation of other guidelines and (open) standards within local governments

Universal Access To Interaction As Revealed By Uahci Words

The analysis of publications created over time as journal articles and other media is important to emphasize the interests, identity and culture in a certain research area. This paper proposes an analysis on the content of the Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction (UAHCI) conferences since 2007, based on information from the article titles. We were especially interested in knowing about changes in recent years related to user categories, the technologies used, and the processes associated with the systems engineering or with the human-computer interaction practices. Discussions are situated from the creation and observation of tagclouds formed with the data. As a contribution, we found what the words reveal about main trends of the area, the profile and the differences between the various editions of the conference, and also the gaps and potential for future research work toward accessibility and design for all. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.8009 LNCSPART 12130Soper, D.S., Turel, O., An n-gram analysis of communications (2000-2010) (2012) Communications, ACM, 55 (5), pp. 81-87Cerf, V.G., Why is accessibility so hard? (2012) Communications of the ACM, 55 (12), p. 7Bateman, S., Gutwin, C., Nacenta, M., Seeing things in the clouds: The effect of visual features on tag cloud selections (2008) Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, pp. 193-202. , HT 2008, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, June 19-21. ACM Press, New YorkRivadeneira, A.W., Gruen, D.M., Muller, M.J., Millen, D.R., Getting our head in the clouds: Toward evaluation studies of tagclouds (2007) Proceeding of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 995-998. , ACM Press, New York , CHI 2007, San Jose, California, USA, April 28-May 3Kuo, B.Y.-L., Hentrich, T., Good, B.M., Wilkinson, M.D., Tag clouds for summarizing web search results (2007) Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2007, pp. 1203-1204. , Banff, Alberta, Canada, May 8-12. ACM Press, New YorkStephanidis, C., (2007) HCI, pp. 4554-4555. , Part I, II, III. LNCS, 4556. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)Stephanidis, C., (2009) Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, , Part I, II, III, HCII 2009. LNCS 5614, 5615, 5616 Springer, HeidelbergStephanidis, C., (2011) Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, Part I, II, III, HCII 2011. LNCS 6765, 6766, 6767, 6768, , Springer, HeidelbergSellen, A., Rogers, Y., Harper, R., Rodden, T., Reflecting human values in the digital age (2009) ACM Communications, 52 (3), pp. 58-6