Sustainability Aspects of Barrier-Free Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the Private Sector

Part 2: SustainabilityInternational audienceThis paper will examine sustainability aspects of accessible information and communication technology for the private sector. First, the introduction highlights the current barriers against and drivers for barrier-free ICT. Second, the ICT scope for the further examination will be declared. Common accepted usability design clusters will be used to illustrate accessibility design principles. Regarding the impact of barrier-free ICT on sustainability aspects, three dimensions will be determined. For each dimension several positive effects, initiated by the implementation of accessible ICT, will be demonstrated

Principles for Human-Centred Design of IR Interfaces

Since the ‘80s, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers have performed a lot of work to identify principles, techniques, and methodologies that can support design, evaluation and implementation of interactive systems that fulfill needs and expectations of their users. This chapter discusses con- cepts, such as usability and user experience, which are of great importance for the success of interactive systems, illustrating how Human-Centred Design is fundamental to create successful user interfaces. Principles proposed by the HCI community to support interface design are presented, analyzing the princi- ples that have a major impact on IR interfaces

Semi-Supervised Learning based Aesthetic Classifier for Short Animations Embedded in Web Pages

Abstract. We propose a semi-supervised learning based computational model for aesthetic classification of short animation videos, which are nowadays part of many web pages. The proposed model is expected to be useful in developing an overall aesthetic model of web pages, leading to better evaluation of web page usability. We identified two feature sets describing aesthetics of an animated video. Based on the feature sets, we developed a Naïve-Bayes classifier by applying Co-training, a semi-supervised machine learning technique. The model classifies the videos as good, average or bad in terms of their aesthetic quality. We designed 18 videos and got those rated by 17 participants for use as the initial training set. Another set of 24 videos were designed and labeled using Co-training. We conducted an empirical study with 16 videos and 23 participants to ascertain the efficacy of the proposed model. The study results show 75 % model accuracy

Delexicalized Word Embeddings for Cross-lingual Dependency Parsing

International audienceThis paper presents a new approach to the problem of cross-lingual dependency parsing, aiming at leveraging training data from different source languages to learn a parser in a target language. Specifically , this approach first constructs word vector representations that exploit structural (i.e., dependency-based) contexts but only considering the morpho-syntactic information associated with each word and its contexts. These delexicalized word em-beddings, which can be trained on any set of languages and capture features shared across languages, are then used in combination with standard language-specific features to train a lexicalized parser in the target language. We evaluate our approach through experiments on a set of eight different languages that are part the Universal Dependencies Project. Our main results show that using such delexicalized embeddings, either trained in a monolin-gual or multilingual fashion, achieves significant improvements over monolingual baselines

A framework of affordance and usability of mobile user interface for older adults

Growing ageing phenomena and prevalence of mobile technology give rise to the unexplored ‘silver surfer’ group in the local market. Due to ageing, many older adults suffer declination of cognitive, motor and physical abilities. Many of them experience difficulties using certain features when interacting with their mobile phones, especially technology shift from keypad-enabled to touch-screen mobile user interfaces. However, there is still no profound knowledge about how to design for local older adults, and which particular role of affordance might play to ensure usability of mobile user interface for older adults. The role of affordance is very much related to how an older adult perceives a new mobile user interface when they first expose to it that s/he has never seen it before, and have no clues what to do with it. This paper formulates a conceptual research framework for affordance and usability of mobile user interface for older adults