Robert Stevens
About the author:
No description available of Robert Stevens...
Publications by Robert Stevens (bibliography)
» 2008 «
Bechhofer, Sean, Yesilada, Yeliz, Stevens, Robert, Jupp, Simon and Horan, Bernard (2008): Using Ontologies and Vocabularies for Dynamic Linking. In IEEE Internet Computing, 12 (3) pp. 32-39
Yesilada, Yeliz, Jay, Caroline, Stevens, Robert and Harper, Simon (2008): Validating the use and role of visual elements of web pages in navigation with an eye-tracking study. In: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on the World Wide Web 2008. pp. 11-20. Available online
“This paper presents an eye-tracking study that examines how people use the visual elements of Web pages to complete certain tasks. Whilst these elements are available to play their role in these tasks for sighted users, it is not the case for visually disabled users. This lack of access to some visual elements of a page means that visually disabled users are hindered in accomplishing these tasks. Our previous work has introduced a framework that identifies these elements and then reengineers Web pages such that these elements can play their intended roles in an audio, as well as visual presentation. To further improve our understanding of how these elements are used and to validate our framework, we track the eye movements of sighted users performing a number of different tasks. The resulting gaze data show that there is a strong relationship between the aspects of a page that receive visual attention and the objects identified by our framework. The study also shows some limitations, as well as yielding information to address these short-comings. Perhaps the most important result is the support provided for a particular kind of object called a Way Edge -- the visual construct used to group content into sections. There is a significant effect of Way Edges on the distribution of attention across tasks. This is a result that not only provides strong evidence for the utility of re-engineering, but also has consequences for our understanding of how people allocate attention to different parts of a page. We speculate that the phenomenon of 'Banner Blindness' owes as much to Way Edges, as it does to colour and font size.”
Copyrights may apply
» 2007 «
Eger, Nicola, Ball, Linden J., Stevens, Robert and Dodd, Jon (2007): Cueing Retrospective Verbal Reports in Usability Testing Through Eye-Movement Replay. In: Proceedings of the HCI07 Conference on People and Computers XXI 2007. p. 13. Available online
“An experimental validation is presented of a novel method for usability testing that entails the playback of dynamic eyetracking data to cue the elicitation of retrospective verbal reports. Participants in our study produced: (1) think-aloud reports during an online search task, and (2) retrospective reports during another online search task, with reports being cued by the playback of either the screen capture of events or the participant's own eye-movements. Task-completion times and response rates were recorded for all reporting methods. Fewer participants completed the search task whilst thinking aloud, indicating the reactivity of this technique. Verbal transcripts were coded for instances of usability problems. The eye-cued method identified more usability problems than the think-aloud or screen-cued methods. A significant interaction between search engine type and retrospective cue type suggests that the value of the eye-cue method for eliciting usability problems may be greatest with more complex search environments. Our results demonstrate that when cued appropriately, retrospective reports may be less reactive and more informative than other verbalisation techniques.”
Copyrights may apply
Stevens, Robert, Aranguren, Mikel Egaña, Wolstencroft, Katy, Sattler, Ulrike, Drummond, Nick, Horridge, Matthew and Rector, Alan (2007): Using OWL to model biological knowledge. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 65 (7) pp. 583-594
“Much has been written of the facilities for ontology building and reasoning offered for ontologies expressed in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Less has been written about how the modelling requirements of different areas of interest are met by OWL-DL's underlying model of the world. In this paper we use the disciplines of biology and bioinformatics to reveal the requirements of a community that both needs and uses ontologies. We use a case study of building an ontology of protein phosphatases to show how OWL-DL's model can capture a large proportion of the community's needs. We demonstrate how Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) can extend inherent limitations of this model. We give examples of relationships between more than two instances; lists and exceptions, and conclude by illustrating what OWL-DL and its underlying description logic either cannot handle in theory or because of lack of implementation. Finally, we present a research agenda that, if fulfilled, would help ensure OWL's wider take up in the life science community.”
Copyrights may apply
Yesilada, Yeliz, Stevens, Robert, Harper, Simon and Goble, Carole (2007): Evaluating DANTE: Semantic transcoding for visually disabled users. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 14 (3) p. 14
“The importance of the World Wide Web for information dissemination is indisputable. However, the dominance of visual design on the Web leaves visually disabled people at a disadvantage. Although assistive technologies, such as screen readers, usually provide basic access to information, the richness of the Web experience is still often lost. In particular, traversing the Web becomes a complicated task since the richness of visual objects presented to their sighted counterparts are neither appropriate nor accessible to visually disabled users. To address this problem, we have proposed an approach called Dante in which Web pages are annotated with semantic information to make their traversal properties explicit. Dante supports usage of different annotation techniques and as a proof-of-concept in this article, pages are annotated manually which when transcoded become rich. We first introduce Dante and then present a user evaluation which compares how visually disabled users perform certain travel-related tasks on original and transcoded versions of Web pages. We discuss the evaluation methodology in detail and present our findings, which provide useful insights into the transcoding process. Our evaluation shows that, in tests with users, document objects transcoded with Dante have a tendency to be much easier for visually disabled users to interact with when traversing Web pages.”
Copyrights may apply
Jay, Caroline, Stevens, Robert, Glencross, Mashhuda, Chalmers, Alan and Yang, Cathy (2007): How people use presentation to search for a link: expanding the understanding of accessibility on the Web. In Universal Access in the Information Society, 6 (3) pp. 307-320
“It is well known that many Web pages are difficult to use for visually disabled people. Without access to a rich visual display, the intended structure and organisation of the page is obscured. To fully understand what is missing from the experience of visually disabled users, it is pertinent to ask how the presentation of Web pages on a standard display makes them easier for sighted people to use. This paper reports on an exploratory eye tracking study that addresses this issue by investigating how sighted readers use the presentation of the BBC News Web page to search for a link. The standard page presentation is compared with a "text-only" version, demonstrating both qualitatively and quantitatively that the removal of the intended presentation alters "reading" behaviours. The demonstration that the presentation of information assists task completion suggests that it should be re-introduced to non-visual presentations if the Web is to become more accessible. The conducted study also explored the extent to which algorithms that generate maps of what is perceptually salient on a page match the gaze data recorded in the eye tracking study. The correspondence between a page's presentation, knowledge of what is visually salient, and how people use these features to complete a task might offer an opportunity to re-model a Web page to maximise access to its most important parts.”
Copyrights may apply
» 2005 «
Harper, Simon, Goble, Carole and Stevens, Robert (2005): Augmenting the mobility of profoundly blind Web travellers. In New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 11 (1) pp. 103-128
“Use the word 'accessibility' in the presence of any HCI1 specialist and they will immediately think of creating open interfaces that can be accessed both visually and audibly. Further, mention 'accessability' to any forward thinking group of Web developers and they will start to quote the Web Accessability Initiative Guidelines (WAI) and extol the virtues of accessability checking tools like 'Bobby'. Either way, both groups will focus on the obviously important area of 'sensory translation' but will miss one fundamental truth; profoundly blind people interact with their environment in a markedly different way from that of sighted individuals. We have realized that the ease of movement (mobility) around systems and information space (the hypertext/Web docuverse) is central to good accessibility; and that to achieve this we require additional mobility semantics within systems and information as a way of enhancing the user experience. By adding small amounts of information to existing Web pages (semi-) automatically, we can show significant improvements in the amount of information profoundly blind users are able to access in a given time; in effect 'levelling the playing field' with sighted users. This paper discusses our work and demonstrates how we can make such a claim.”
Copyrights may apply
Plessers, Peter, Casteleyn, Sven, Yesilada, Yeliz, Troyer, Olga De, Stevens, Robert, Harper, Simon and Goble, Carole (2005): Accessibility: a Web engineering approach. In: Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on the World Wide Web 2005. pp. 353-362. Available online
“Currently, the vast majority of web sites do not support accessibility for visually impaired users. Usually, these users have to rely on screen readers: applications that sequentially read the content of a web page in audio. Unfortunately, screen readers are not able to detect the meaning of the different page objects, and thus the implicit semantic knowledge conveyed in the presentation of the page is lost. One approach described in literature to tackle this problem, is the Dante approach, which allows semantic annotation of web pages to provide screen readers with extra (semantic) knowledge to better facilitate the audio presentation of a web page. Until now, such annotations were done manually, and failed for dynamic pages. In this paper, we combine the Dante approach with a web design method, WSDM, to fully automate the generation of the semantic annotation for visually impaired users. To do so, the semantic knowledge gathered during the design process is exploited, and the annotations are generated as a by-product of the design process, requiring no extra effort from the designer.”
Copyrights may apply
» 2004 «
Yesilada, Yeliz, Stevens, Robert, Goble, Carole and Hussein, Shazad (2004): Rendering tables in audio: the interaction of structure and reading styles. In: Sixth Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies 2004. pp. 16-23. Available online
“Tables remain a persistent problem for visually impaired people using screen readers. Tables are complex structures that are widely used for different purposes such as spatial layout or data summarisation. The multi-dimensional nature of tables challenges the linear interaction styles typically supported by screen readers. To read a table, a user needs to maintain coherency of, and interact with more than one dimension. In this paper, we first characterise why tables are useful in print, but difficult to read in the audio. We present a survey of the relationship between table structure, intention and the reading styles employed to use the content of tables. We then present two different approaches for interacting with tables non-visually. These approaches are designed to support the characteristics of tables that make them such a popular and useful means of conveying information. The first approach provides a small table browser called EVITA (Enabling Visually Impaired Table Access), whose aim is to enable non-visual table browsing and reading in an analogous manner to the print medium. The second approach provides a table lineariser to transform tables into a form such that they can be easily read by screen readers.”
Copyrights may apply
Brown, Andy, Pettifer, Steve and Stevens, Robert (2004): Evaluation of a non-visual molecule browser. In: Sixth Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies 2004. pp. 40-47. Available online
“This paper describes the evaluation of software, software designed to allow visually impaired users to explore the structures of chemical molecules using a speech based presentation. Molecular structures are typically presented as two dimensional schematics, and are an important example of a widely used form of diagram -- the graph. software is designed for exploring this specific class of graph. Among its features is the ability to recognise and make explicit features of the graph that would otherwise need to be inferred. The evaluation compared software with a simpler version without this facility, and found that participants were able to explore molecular structures more easily. We discuss the software, evaluation and results, particularly comparing them with theoretical considerations about how sighted readers use diagrams. Finally, we extract the important issues for non-visual graph presentation: making implicit features explicit; enabling hierarchical and connection-based browsing; allowing annotation; and helping users keep their orientation.”
Copyrights may apply
Harper, Simon, Goble, Carole, Stevens, Robert and Yesilada, Yeliz (2004): Middleware to expand context and preview in hypertext. In: Sixth Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies 2004. pp. 63-70. Available online
“Movement, or mobility, is key to the accessibility, design, and usability of many hypermedia resources (websites); and key to good mobility is context and preview by probing. This is especially the case for visually impaired users when a hypertext anchor is inaccurately described or is described out of context. This means confusion and disorientation. Mobility is similarly reduced when the link target of the anchor has no relationship to the expected information present on the hypertext node (web-page). We suggest that confident movement with purpose, ease, and accuracy can only be achieved when complete contextual information and an accurate description of the proposed destination (preview) are available. Our past work (1) deriving mobility heuristics from mobility models, (2) transforming web-pages based on these heuristics, and (3) building tools to analyse and access these transformed pages; has shown us that a tool to expand context and preview would be useful. In this paper we describe the development of such a middleware tool to automatically and dynamically annotate web-pages with additional context information present within the page, and preview information present within hypertext link destinations found on the page.”
Copyrights may apply
Harper, Simon, Yesilada, Yeliz, Goble, Carole and Stevens, Robert (2004): How much is too much in a hypertext link?: investigating context and preview -- a formative evaluation. In: Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext 2004. pp. 116-125. Available online
“A high quality of free movement, or mobility, is key to the accessibility, design, and usability of many 'common-use' hypermedia resources (Web sites) and key to good mobility is context and preview. This is especially the case when a hypertext anchor is inaccurately described or is described out of context as confusion and disorientation can ensue. Mobility is similarly reduced when the link target of the anchor has no relationship to the expected information present on the hypertext node (Web page). Confident movement with purpose, ease, and accuracy can only be achieved when complete contextual information and an accurate description of the proposed destination (preview) are available. We suggest that sighted people can benefit from additional context and preview information included in hyperlinks and disprove the empirical evidence that suggests these users do not benefit from link descriptions which have this enhanced information. We briefly describe a middleware system to automatically expand context and preview in link descriptions thereby 'fixing' terse links, links out of context, and inaccurate or inadequate preview information. Finally, we conduct a formative evaluation which shows us that a system to expand context and preview would be useful in different ways depending on the type of link.”
Copyrights may apply
Brown, Andy, Stevens, Robert and Pettifer, Steve (2004): Issues in the Non-Visual Presentation of Graph Based Diagrams. In: IV 2004 - 8th International Conference on Information Visualisation 14-16 July, 2004, London, UK. pp. 671-676. Available online
Zhao, Jun, Goble, Carole and Stevens, Robert (2004): Semantic web applications to e-science in silico experiments. In: Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on the World Wide Web 2004. pp. 284-285. Available online
“This paper explains our research and implementations of manual, automatic and deep annotations of provenance logs for e-Science in silico experiments. Compared to annotating general Web documents, annotations for scientific data require more sophisticated professional knowledge to recognize concepts from documents, and more complex text extraction and mapping mechanisms. A simple automatic annotation approach based on "lexicons" and a deep annotation implemented by semantically populating, translating and annotating provenance logs are introduced in this paper. We used COHSE (Conceptual Open Hypermedia Services Environment) to annotate and browse provenance logs from my Grid project, which are conceptually linked together as a hypertext Web of provenance logs and experiment resources, based on the associated conceptual metadata and reasoning over these metadata.”
Copyrights may apply
Yesilada, Yeliz, Harper, Simon, Goble, Carole and Stevens, Robert (2004): DANTE: annotation and transformation of web pages for visually impaired users. In: Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on the World Wide Web 2004. pp. 490-491. Available online
“Most Web pages are designed for visual interaction so the mobility, or ease of travel, of visually impaired Web travellers is reduced [2]. Objects that support travel and mobility are not in an appropriate form for nonvisual interaction. Our goal is to enhance the mobility of visually impaired Web travellers by annotating pages with a travel ontology that aims to encapsulate rich structural and navigational knowledge. We propose a semi-automated tool 'Dante' which aims to analyse Web pages to extract travel objects, discover their roles, annotate them with a travel ontology and transform pages based on the annotations to enhance the provided mobility support. This poster introduces the travel ontology and presents how Web pages are annotated with this ontology to guide the transformations.”
Copyrights may apply
» 2003 «
Yesilada, Yeliz, Stevens, Robert and Goble, Carole (2003): A foundation for tool based mobility support for visually impaired web users. In: Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on the World Wide Web 2003. pp. 422-430. Available online
“Users make journeys through the Web. Web travel encompasses the tasks of orientation and navigation, the environment and the purpose of the journey. The ease of travel, its mobility, varies from page to page and site to site. For visually impaired users, in particular, mobility is reduced; the objects that support travel are inaccessible or missing altogether. Web development tools need to include support to increase mobility. We present a framework for finding and classifying travel objects within Web pages. The evaluation carried out has shown that this framework supports a systematic and consistent method for assessing travel upon the Web. We propose that such a framework can provide the foundation for a semi-automated tool for the support of travel upon the Web.”
Copyrights may apply
» 2000 «
Goble, Carole, Harper, Simon and Stevens, Robert (2000): The Travails of Visually Impaired Web Travellers. In: Hypertext 00 - Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia May 30 - June 03, 2000, San Antonio, Texas, USA. pp. 1-10. Available online
» 1997 «
Stevens, Robert, Edwards, Alistair and Harling, Philip A. (1997): Access to Mathematics for Visually Disabled Students Through Multimodal Interaction. In Human-Computer Interaction, 12 (1) pp. 47-92
“Mathematics relies on visual forms of communication and is thus largely inaccessible to people who cannot communicate in this manner because of visual disabilities. This article outlines the Mathtalk project, which addressed this problem by using computers to produce multimodal renderings of mathematical information. This example is unusual in that it is essential to use multiple modalities because of the nature and the difficulty of the application. In addition, the emphasis is on nonvisual (and hence novel) modalities. Crucial to designing a usable auditory interface to algebra notation is an understanding of the differences between visual and listening reading, particularly those aspects that make the former active and the latter passive. A discussion of these differences yields the twin themes of compensation for lack of external memory and provision of control over information flow. These themes were addressed by: the introduction of prosody to convey algebraic structure in synthetically spoken expressions; the provision of structure-based browsing functions; and the use of a prosody-based musical glance based on algebra earcons.”
Copyrights may apply
SHOW THIS LIST ON YOUR HOMEPAGE
What do YOU think?
Give us your opinion! Do you have any comments/additions that you would like other visitors to see?
You say:
Mar 16th, 2010
Changes to this page (author)
11 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on Robert Stevens's author page.09 Jul 2009: Author was edited 09 Jul 2009: Author was edited
09 Jul 2009: Author was edited
09 Jul 2009: Author was edited
09 Jul 2009: Author was edited
27 Jun 2009: Author was edited
14 Jun 2009: Author was edited
02 Jun 2009: Author was edited
12 May 2008: Author was edited
12 May 2008: Author was edited
12 May 2008: Author was edited
23 Jun 2007: Author was edited
23 Jun 2007: Author was edited
22 Jun 2007: Author was edited
22 Jun 2007: Author was edited
22 Jun 2007: Author was edited
28 Apr 2003: Added the author to the bibliography
