Accessible choral ensembles for visually impaired singers

Choral activities are generally led by a conductor who uses visual cues and non-verbal instructions to drive the performance. Song dynamics are generally well rehearsed however live performances may necessitate unrehearsed messages in order to correct errors or to introduce dynamics in response to external factors. These messages are communicated by the choir master just-in-time, to which however, visually impaired choristers have no access. This paper outlines an investigation into how technology can contribute to this end while presenting a solution which adopts optoelectronic devices for gesture recognition, real-time communication protocols and over-the-air haptic-feedback to enable participation while minimising adoption barriers via intuitive and low-friction interaction. Insights from both qualitative and quantitative techniques will be presented along with techniques used to understand, assess and evaluate the domain in an iterative series of interventions.peer-reviewe

Butterfleye : supporting the development of accessible web applications for users with severe motor-impairment

Various accessibility standards and guidelines exist, targeting different disabilities. Nonetheless persons suffering from Severe Motor Disabilities (SMD) are generally excluded from development efforts, mainly because of a lack in accessibility regulations, standards and developer support. This work presents Butterfleye, a novel developer-centric tool that facilitates the development of accessible gaze-driven web applications for SMD users. Butterfleye relies and builds upon a widely-adopted open-source front-end framework to incentivise frictionless developer adoption. Low cost eye-tracking devices are also examined to lower barriers for end-user adoption. We present an open-source library developed iteratively over a series of user-centric studies and report initial evidence of, and observations on, its effectiveness with SMD users.peer-reviewe

Designing acceptable user registration processes for e-services

User registration can have a serious impact on the success of online government services. Different services require different levels of identity assurance, and different registration processes are put in place to deliver them. But from the citizen’s perspective, these processes often require a disproportionate amount of effort, which reduces users’ acceptance. Typically, when sign-up to high-effort services is not mandatory, take-up is low; when it is compulsory, it causes resentment, and neither is desirable. Designers of services requiring registration currently have no way of assessing likely user acceptance at design time. We are introducing a tool that allows system designers to identify the impact of registration processes on different groups of users, in terms of workload and friction. Personas have been successfully applied to assist security designers, and we extend the concept with statistical properties, and introduce the Persona Group Calibration (PGC) exercise to calibrate the different personas for sensitivity to specific identity-related elements.peer-reviewe

Dwell-free typing using an EOG based virtual keyboard

This work presents the development of an asynchronous dwell-free virtual keyboard application which can be operated using electrooculographic (EOG) data. Unlike other EOG based eye typing applications, the developed system avoids the use of dwell-times and relieves the user from the need to perform repetitive and unnatural eye movements tomove a cursor towards the desired letter or the need to perform voluntary blinks to interact with the application. Instead, the proposed application requires the user to simply glance through the vicinity of the desired letters, as one would swipe through letters when typing on a touchscreen device, after which a set of word predictions are displayed for the user to select. The proposed application obtained a top five rate of 76.00 ± 12.61% using EOG data which is comparable to the top five rate of 79.00 ± 13.37% obtained when operating the application using a vision-based eye gaze tracker.peer-reviewe

In Search of Coherence: A Review of E-Mail Research

ABSTRACT E-mail research encompasses a vast and diverse body of work that accumulated over the past 30 years. In this article, we take a critical look at the research literature and ask two simple questions: What is e-mail research? Can it help us reinvent e-mail? Rather than defining an overarching framework, we survey the literature and identify three metaphors that have guided e-mail research up to this day: e-mail as a file cabinet extending human information processing capabilities, e-mail as a production line and locus of work coordination, and, finally, e-mail as a communication genre supporting social and organizational processes. We propose this taxonomy so that designers of future e-mail systems can forge their own direction of research, with knowledge of other directions that have been explored in the past. As an illustration of the possible future work we want to encourag