At the core of the vision of User Interfaces for All is a mix of existing and emerging technologies, which are likely to predominate the life cycle of future user interfaces to a wide range of applications and telematic services; these interfaces must be both accessible and provide high quality interaction to potentially all users, so as to be usable by a diverse user population, including people with different cultural, educational, training and employment background, novice and experienced computer users, the very young and the elderly, and people with different types of disabilities, in various interaction contexts and scenarios of use.
“Information Technology is the backbone of the new millennium. Next generation interfaces, new digital media, emerging telecommunications technology and high-performance, advanced information systems comprise the new global information infrastructure. At the core of this technology is the human factor -- how people use information, why, when and where. The importance of human centered design has never been as critical -- particularly when it lacks the essence of sensory design: designing for people with disabilities. This talk describes the current state of IT and access for people with disabilities. It suggests that the strategy for the future state requires a new direction and proposes a creative, international initiative.”
“In this paper we introduce the UbicompBrowser, a system that applies ubiquitous computing to the World-Wide Web. The UbicompBrowser extends the World-Wide Web in two ways into our everyday environments. First, it extends the browser concept by replacing the standard web user interface with a handheld access and control device and surrounding output devices. This ubiquitous user interface is determined dynamically based on the location of the handheld control. Secondly, the UbicompBrowser system extends the web concept of uniform access to resources by applying the same access method, uniform resource identifiers, to environment-specific resources, for example for access to the TV channels available on a TV set, and for access to light switches. In summary, the UbicompBrowser improves web accessibility by realizing a ubiquitous environment-based user interface, and by extending accessibility to environment-specific resources. The approach constitutes a user interface for all flexibly adapted to their environment, interfacing both global resources in the web and local resources in a given user environment.”
“Social navigation is an alternative to the prevailing methods for navigating metaphors. It utilises the fact that most information navigation in the real world is performed by interaction with other people. Based on literature studies and user studies on social navigation we have developed six principles that have to be taken into consideration when designing systems for social navigation in order to make the navigational experience more efficient, qualitative and enjoyable. The principles are Integration, Trust, Presence, Privacy, Appropriateness and Personalization.”
“The Teallach project is building a system which eases the design and implementation of user interfaces (web-based or otherwise) to object-oriented database applications. Teallach takes a model based approach and is constructing its system around three main models -- a domain model which describes the database structures with which Teallach can cope; a task model, in which the user-involved aspects of the application can be described; and a presentation model. The presentation model is intended to support the storage of user interaction objects, so that these objects can be found, customised and composed into user interfaces suitable for the tasks. In seeking an appropriate presentation model, we have found that previous models are either those underlying toolkits, which are overly concrete and detailed, or are abstract models based entirely around the look of the interaction objects, but not their intended role. We are implementing a model which describes each interaction object in terms of its purpose, the kinds of data with which the user is allowed to interact, constraints on its use, and a description of configurable aspects of the interface in terms of the ways in which they support interaction. This paper describes this model and gives examples of its use.”
“Information overload makes it more and more difficult to get the right information at the right time. Nowadays, users get overwhelmed by the massive amount of information available on the Internet. The 'traditional' pull technology model is becoming a limit for more efficient use of the Web. Specifically requesting information from a particular source, e.g. downloading a Web page with a browser is an example of pull technology. As Web grows in size and complexity the importance of new information delivery models such as push technology increases. The push technology was created to alleviate problems facing users of the Internet, e.g. information overload and low bandwidth. The push technology is a data distribution technology in which selected data is automatically delivered into the user's computer at prescribed intervals or based on some event that occurs. The push technology can be used to make information more accessible for the user. By applying the push technology it is possible to design and implement user-friendly and effective information delivery systems. In this paper we first define what the push technology is. We will also describe what the advantages and disadvantages of the push technology are, and how we can utilise it best. This paper also contains a table where basic information about 50 different push tools has been collected.”
“Numerous guidelines are available to support designing accessible and usable web sites. However, most of these guidelines come from multiple guidelines sources with various trust levels so that their application does not guarantee any improvement of neither the accessibility nor the usability of web sites. A corpus of validated web design guidelines is therefore expected to insure such an improvement. To reach a corpus of guidelines designers can trust in, five steps were performed: firstly, guidelines sources were categorised according to a source model; secondly, the most representative and interesting guidelines sources were selected on a basis of selection parameters; thirdly, guidelines belonging to these selected sources were categorised in turn according to a general purpose guideline model and subsequently gathered to form an initial corpus of guidelines; fourthly, particular guidelines were selected by properties to be subject to a dedicated validation; fifthly, these guidelines were empirically validated by analysing the user satisfaction score. A first corpus of validated web design guidelines was consequently divided into three parts: text-only sites, graphical sites, and framed sites. This corpus is itself transformed in a web site with a design relying on its own contents.”
“This paper discusses the employment of self-adaptation techniques in WWW-based interactive systems, as a tool for ensuring their universal accessibility. The paper first elaborates on the underpinnings of universal accessibility and their relevance to Web applications and services. Then it provides a contextual definition of self-adapting systems and an account of how self-adaptation relates to accessibility. Subsequently, different adaptation approaches that may be employed on the Web are presented, as well as their potential correlation to accessibility solutions. Finally, the application of some of the proposed approaches in the development of Web-based information systems is presented.”
“Though information systems using controlled language for indexing and searching (classification systems, subject headings and thesauri) have a longer tradition, many retrieval systems today are based on free-text searching: the natural language of words in titles, abstracts or the full text of documents. Both research and common experience have by now identified the relative weaknesses and strengths of these two approaches. For example from a summary given by Aitchison et al.: for controlled language "an artificial language has to be learned by a searcher, [but] the burden of searching is eased [because it] controls synonyms [..] and leads [from] specific natural language concepts to the nearest preferred terms [..] [and] avoids precision loss through over-exhaustivity" whereas for natural language "words and phrases used by searcher are [his own], [but] the intellectual effort is placed on searcher [and] exhaustivity may lead to loss of precision".”
“The question of accessibility to the Web takes on a special meaning in educational settings where access to information requires cognitive elaboration of the page contents. It is, therefore, a matter of "cognitive access" to the Web. The main efforts of the designers of Web Based Instruction (WBI) environments to encourage cognitive access are usually aimed at the organisation and presentation of Web documents and at specific cues which can improve the user's interaction, orientation and navigation through the pages. However, it is possible to improve this high-level access to the information by supporting study activities through specific "Working tools" which can be implemented in the Web environment. In this paper we report on the design solutions we have adopted to provide cognitive access to a WBI environment for university students studying Architecture and Town Planning. In particular, we introduce "Working tools" that can be used to support flexible and effective study activities. The adopted design solutions provide different classes of users (not only students) with different access facilities. Finally, it should be noted that the methodologies of the design of WBI systems should deal with this kind of high level access and support it through specific solutions at interface and implementation levels.”
“This position paper reviews and provides a consolidated account of the results of the second workshop of the International Scientific Forum "Towards an Information Society for All" that took place in Heraklion, Crete, Greece on June 15-16, 1998. Specifically, it examines the developed recommendations for further R&D work, in the light of recent developments and initiatives related to universal access to today's and tomorrow's applications and services.”
Page maintainer: The Editorial Team How to cite/reference this page
URL: http://www.interaction-design.org/references/conferences/proceedings_of_the_4th_ercim_workshop_on_user_interfaces_for_all.html
You say:
Mar 13th, 2010
