Towards Truly Accessible MOOCs for Persons with Cognitive Disabilities: Design and Field Assessment

International audienceMOOCs are playing an increasingly important role in education systems. Unfortunately, MOOCs are not fully accessible. In this paper, we propose design principles to enhance the accessibility of MOOC players, especially for persons with cognitive disabilities. These principles result from a participatory design process gathering 7 persons with disabilities and 13 expert professionals. They are also inspired by various design approaches (Universal Design for Learning, Instructional Design, Environmental Support). We also detail the creation of a MOOC player offering a set of accessibility features that users can alter according to their needs and capabilities. We used it to teach a MOOC on digital accessibility. Finally, we conducted a field study to assess learning and usability outcomes for persons with cognitive and non-cognitive impairments. Results support the effectiveness of our player for increasing accessibility

Intelligent Interfaces to Empower People with Disabilities

Severe motion impairments can result from non-progressive disorders, such as cerebral palsy, or degenerative neurological diseases, such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Multiple Sclerosis (MS), or muscular dystrophy (MD). They can be due to traumatic brain injuries, for example, due to a traffic accident, or to brainste

When privacy and utility are in harmony: Towards better design of presence technologies

Presence systems are valuable in supporting workplace communication and collaboration. These systems are effective, however, only if they are widely adopted and candidly used. User perceptions of the utility of the information being shared and their comfort in sharing such information strongly impact both adoption and use. This paper describes the results of a survey of user preferences regarding comfort with and utility of sharing presence data in the workplace; the effects of sampling frequency, fidelity, and aggregation; and design implications of these results. We present new results that extend some past findings and challenge others. We contribute new insights that inform the design of workplace presence technologies to increase both the utility and adoption of these systems. © 2012 Springer-Verlag London Limited

Spotlight on Off-Screen Points of Interest in Handheld Augmented Reality: Halo-based techniques

International audienc

Designing a Creature Believability Scale for Videogames

Part 6: Game UnderstandingInternational audienceThis paper describes the design, and early evaluation of a scale aimed at assessing the believability of creatures in videogames. These creatures include all zoomorphic entities that do not qualify as fundamentally human-like, whether or not they have characteristics identifiable as anthropomorphic. The work is based on principles drawn from biology, animation, illustration and artificial intelligence. After developing the scale’s 46 original items, it was administrated as a Likert Scale questionnaire. The results were analyzed through Principal Component Analysis and they suggest that 26 items, out of the original 46, spread across 4 dimensions, could be used to evaluate creature believability