Accessibility and IoT / Smart and Connected Communities

The Internet of things (IoT) has unlimited potential to empower the lives of everyone. IoT devices increasingly appear in homes and power smart and connected communities. Related user experience design efforts must involve and consider people with disabilities, including the world’s rapidly aging population of seniors. They must be able to use IoT device and app interfaces. While secure and private IoT device data collection and communication are important for everyone, related needs that are unique to people with disabilities must be addressed. Many current resources and developing efforts that can benefit UX designers to address these needs exist

Murky Waters: United States Port Capacity and Dredging Issues

The events of this decade has brought public attention on the adequacy of United States ports to serve the nation\u27s needs. Many experts involved in maritime transportation have noted that the United States would be able to enjoy economies of scale associated with large vessels only if the United States developed substantially deeper ports capable of handling these large vessels. Although the apparent advantages and trends to larger vessels in the world fleet were evident, recent history has seen little in the way of a response to these perceived needs for deeper United States ports. This study addresses important issues concerning the need for additional port capacity to handle large vessels and presents some conclusions thereof

Text Simplification Using Neural Machine Translation

Text simplification (TS) is the technique of reducing the lexical, syntactical complexity of text. Existing automatic TS systems can simplify text only by lexical simplification or by manually defined rules. Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is a recently proposed approach for Machine Translation (MT) that is receiving a lot of research interest. In this paper, we regard original English and simplified English as two languages, and apply a NMT model–Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) encoder-decoder on TS to make the neural network to learn text simplification rules by itself. Then we discuss challenges and strategies about how to apply a NMT model to the task of text simplification

Text Simplification and Generation Y: An Eye Tracking Study

While important information is often communicated via text, people read only a small fraction of textual content. Ignoring text is particularly prevalent among Generation Y, who prefer image-based communication and exhibit impatient viewing behavior. One way to improve the effectiveness of text-based communication for younger users is to construct textual information in a way that it can be understood with short glances, a hallmark of Generation Y’s impatient viewing behavior. To test this assertion, we used a set of plain language standards (PLS) to simplify a text passage from an actual website. The results of our eye tracking study showed that PLS were successful in improving textual communication for Generation Y users. The simplified text passage was processed with shorter glances, facilitated a more effective visual search behavior, and improved task performance significantly

How Much Does Disability Affect the Likelihood of Employment

This paper describes the methodology and results of a study of the effects of disability on employment, and considers some of the policy implications of the .findings. The study is based on data from two Statistics New Zealand surveys: the 2001 New Zealand Disability Survey and the 2001 Household Labour Force Survey. Key research questions include: what is the level of employment (both part time and full time) amongst people with disability; to what extent are people with disability less likely to be in employment when other personal characteristics (age, gender, ethnicity, qualifications, etc.) are taken into account; and how is the likelihood of employment related to type of disability, severity of disability and the existence of multiple types of impairment? Multivariate analysis of disability data is used to produce a disability typology containing six categories: hearing, vision, mobility, co-ordination/dexterity, learning/memory, and psychological/psychiatric. Employment outcomes are examined for people with each of these types of disability, at different levels of severity. To develop the analysis beyond this descriptive level, a regression-based procedure is used to estimate for people with disability what their employment outcomes would have been in the absence of disability (assuming that other characteristics are unchanged). This provides a counterfactual to the descriptive results on employment, thus permitting assessment of the effect of each type of disability on employment. Additionally, an additive risk model is developed that relates the likelihood of employment to a general risk score based on the number of types of disability that a person has and the severity of those disabilities.The results show that those with disabilities have a greatly diminished likelihood of full-time employment. However, the effect is much smaller when the outcome examined is any degree of employment (i.e. part-time or full- time employment). Those with a hearing disability experience a smaller negative effect in terms of employment outcomes than those with other types of disability, for whom the effects are approximately equal in size. The likelihood of employment diminishes sharply with the severity of disability for all of the disability types except hearing disability; for the latter type, employment does not seem to be very much affected by severity (to the extent that the severity of hearing disability is able to be assessed from the survey data).The paper concludes by considering the study's implications concerning the effectiveness of policies for reducing the negative impact of disability on work participation. In the view of the authors, the findings suggest that there may be greater potential than has been appreciated to raise the level of full-time employment amongst people with disabilities. The challenge is to develop policies that would achieve this

Optimizing Learner Accessibility: Adding American Sign Language (ASL) and Text-to-Speech to Online Trainings

The Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS) Training Program is located at the Eunice K. Shriver Center at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, MA. The CANS Training Program provides training and certification services for the Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS), MassHealth, Children\u27s Behavioral Health Initiative (CBHI). Massachusetts behavioral health providers are required to be CANS certified in order to see Medicaid insured children and youth under the age of 21. The CANS Training Program has trained and certified over 26,000 behavioral health providers throughout Massachusetts in the use of the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS) tool. The Mass CANS on-line training and certification program is designed for clinicians who provide behavioral health services to Massachusetts children and youth under the age of 21. The abilities, learning styles, and primary language spoken among providers is quite diverse. The CANS Training program, committed to providing content accessible to people of all abilities, and has added American Sign Language (ASL) and Text-to-Speech capabilities throughout the online training. These additions to the CANS accessibility toolbox help clinicians of all abilities get the most out of their online training and certification experience. Users may use American Sign Language (ASL) insets or closed captions while using the training videos. We will discuss the recent addition of ASL interpretation and Text-To-Speech functionality to the web-based training; discuss important considerations when improving accessibility; demonstrate the features and discuss our results

Automatic Text Simplification for People with Intellectual Disabilities

Text simplification (TS) aims to reduce the lexical and structural complexity of a text, while still retaining the semantic meaning. Current automatic TS techniques are limited to either lexical-level applications or manually defining a large amount of rules. In this paper, we propose to simplify text from both level of lexicons and sentences. We conduct preliminary experiments to find that our approach shows promising results

Integration of biological effects, fish histopathology and contaminant measurements for the assessment of fish health: A pilot application in Irish marine waters

This study investigates the use of a weight of evidence (WOE) approach to evaluate fish health status and biological effects (BEs) of contaminants for assessment of ecosystem health and discusses its potential application in support of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). External fish disease, liver histopathology and several BEs of contaminant exposure including 7-ethoxy resorufin O-de-ethylase (EROD), acetylcholinesterase (AChE), bile metabolites, vitellogenin (VTG) and alkali labile phosphates (ALP) were measured in two flatfish species from four locations in Ireland. Contaminant levels in fish were generally low with PCBs in fish liver below OSPAR environmental assessment criteria (EAC). There were consistencies with low PCB levels, EROD and PAH bile metabolite levels detected in fish. Dab from Cork, Dublin and Shannon had the highest relative prevalence of liver lesions associated with the carcinogenic pathway. An integrated biomarker response (IBR) showed promise to be useful for evaluation of environmental risk, although more contaminant parameters in liver are required for a full assessment with the present study

How Much Does Disability Affect the Likelihood of Employment

This paper describes the methodology and results of a study of the effects of disability on employment, and considers some of the policy implications of the .findings. The study is based on data from two Statistics New Zealand surveys: the 2001 New Zealand Disability Survey and the 2001 Household Labour Force Survey. Key research questions include: what is the level of employment (both part time and full time) amongst people with disability; to what extent are people with disability less likely to be in employment when other personal characteristics (age, gender, ethnicity, qualifications, etc.) are taken into account; and how is the likelihood of employment related to type of disability, severity of disability and the existence of multiple types of impairment? Multivariate analysis of disability data is used to produce a disability typology containing six categories: hearing, vision, mobility, co-ordination/dexterity, learning/memory, and psychological/psychiatric. Employment outcomes are examined for people with each of these types of disability, at different levels of severity. To develop the analysis beyond this descriptive level, a regression-based procedure is used to estimate for people with disability what their employment outcomes would have been in the absence of disability (assuming that other characteristics are unchanged). This provides a counterfactual to the descriptive results on employment, thus permitting assessment of the effect of each type of disability on employment. Additionally, an additive risk model is developed that relates the likelihood of employment to a general risk score based on the number of types of disability that a person has and the severity of those disabilities.The results show that those with disabilities have a greatly diminished likelihood of full-time employment. However, the effect is much smaller when the outcome examined is any degree of employment (i.e. part-time or full- time employment). Those with a hearing disability experience a smaller negative effect in terms of employment outcomes than those with other types of disability, for whom the effects are approximately equal in size. The likelihood of employment diminishes sharply with the severity of disability for all of the disability types except hearing disability; for the latter type, employment does not seem to be very much affected by severity (to the extent that the severity of hearing disability is able to be assessed from the survey data).The paper concludes by considering the study's implications concerning the effectiveness of policies for reducing the negative impact of disability on work participation. In the view of the authors, the findings suggest that there may be greater potential than has been appreciated to raise the level of full-time employment amongst people with disabilities. The challenge is to develop policies that would achieve this

Photophysical and Electrochemical Properties of meso-Substituted Thien-2-yl Zn(II) Porphyrins

The influence of the thiophene ring on the ground and excited state properties of the porphyrin ring is investigated, when substituted at the meso-position. A series of mono-, di-, tri-, and tetra-meso-thien-2-yl porphyrins are studied and discussed with respect to the reference compounds zinc(II)-5,10,15,20-tetra(thien-2′-yl)porphyrin (1a) and zinc(II)-5,10,15,20-tetraphenylporphyrin (ZnTPP). The extended conjugated system zinc(II)-5-(5′-(5′′-ethynyl-2′′-thiophenecarboxaldehyde)thien-2′-yl)-10,15,20-triphenylporphyrin (4d) is also studied and shows enhanced charge transfer character due to the presence of the terminal aldehyde accepting group. A detailed analysis of ground and excited state UV−vis absorption, steady-state and time-resolved fluorescence, laser flash photolysis, and electrochemical data all point toward substantial electronic communication between the central Zn(II) porphyrin ring and the meso-thien-2-yl substituents, which is evident from excited state charge transfer character