Computers Helping People with Special Needs

In this paper we propose a visual-based speech learning framework to assist deaf persons by comparing the lip movements between a student and an E-tutor in an intelligent tutoring system. The framework utilizes lip reading technologies to determine if a student learns the correct pronunciation. Different from conventional speech recognition systems, which usually recognize a speaker’s utterance, our speech learning framework focuses on recognizing whether a student pronounces are correct according to an instructor’s utterance by using visual information. We propose a method by extracting dynamic shape difference features (DSDF) based on lip shapes to recognize the pronunciation difference. The preliminary experimental results demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of our approach on a database we collected, which contains multiple persons speaking a small number of selected words.

Teaching support software for the hearing impaired students who study computer operation was developed. It is named as SZKIT. The software shows icons of modifier keys when the teacher presses modifier keys and shows mouse icon when he/she clicks a mouse button. These icons appear near the mouse cursor. By this function, a difference between simple dragging and dragging with modifier key can be distinguishable. For the hearing impaired students, it is difficult to distinguish such differences without voice information, because the motions of the mouse cursor on the screen are almost same. Also SZKIT can show instruction texts under the mouse cursor. The timing of changing the texts is controlled by a hot key, keeping the focus on the main application software. From the results of questionnaire to the hearing impaired students, it is clear that SZKIT is useful to learn computer operation.

The term “Hybrid Book” stands for a digital document with a synchronized multimedia content. In the narrower sense, the Hybrid Book is a name of a technology used at Masaryk University for creation of study materials for users with a variety of information channel impairments: the blind, the deaf, dyslectics, and others. A document in this format can include a digital text, an audio recording of a text read by a human voice, and a video recording of a translation of a text into a sign language. These records are shown simultaneously by the given software application when browsing documents. A user can navigate in documents using a variety of specific navigation functions. The Hybrid Book does not only compensate for an information channel; for example, it can also be used as a unique system for creation of foreign language textbooks.

This paper discusses necessary changes and adaptations faced in supporting students with disabilities at Linz University within the last 20 years and the methodology used compared to other support schemes around Europe. The research is based on findings from the study “Social Situation of People with Disabilities in Austria”, the only formal Austrian study also dealing with disability and higher education (as information on a possible “disability” is numbered among “highly sensitive personal data” and therefore not formally surveyed during enrollment), findings from an own survey collecting information from support structures for students with disabilities at Universities in Europe and experiences from supporting students with most diverse (dis-)abilities, skills and knowledge.

Students with disabilities or impairments have often been passive recipients of ‘inclusive practice’ or ‘assistive technology’. The Special Thematic Session (STS) on Putting the Disabled Student in Charge focusses on topics that have a direct impact upon the education of disabled students and covers all aspects of disabled students’ education, from the development of resources to full participation in lectures and collaborative work and the provision of alternative formats.

This paper presents the background, status, challenges and planned future directions of the Danish Biblus project which aims creating a digital library solution to be used to support the integration of visually impaired pupils and students in the mainstream educational system. As a supplement to the RoboBraille alternative media conversion system as well as a stand-alone repository for copyrighted educational material in alternate formats, Biblus was created to allow students, teachers, visual impairment professionals and relatives to access digital versions of educational material. Subject to proper access rights, material can either be delivered directly to the user in the formats stored in the library or indirectly via RoboBraille as mp3 files, Daisy full text/full audio, e-books or Braille books. Future versions of Biblus will be available in multiple languages and include digital rights management as well as support for decentralised contribution of material.

Traditional textbooks can be difficult for print impaired learners to access. Every organisation has its own approach to providing alternative formats but there are common myths that need to be dispelled: the myth of responsibility, that alternative formats should be provided by disability support staff; the myth of specialism, that disabled students should be dealt with by a small team of specialist staff; and the myth that e-books are automatically accessible. This paper suggests a move beyond alternative formats to looking at alternative approaches to meeting the needs of print impaired students.

This paper describes three tools that have been developed to help overcome accessibility, usability and productivity issues identified by disabled students. The Web2Access website allows users to test any Web 2.0 site or software application against a series of checks linked to the WCAG 2.0 and other guidelines. The Access Tools accessible menu helps with navigation to portable pen drive applications that can assist with accessibility, productivity and leisure activities when on the move. The accessible Toolbar provides support for the majority of browsers and accessible websites through magnification, spellchecking, text to speech readout, dictionary definitions and referencing modification of text, page style, colour and layout.

This paper discusses the critical role of bringing together students with disabilities as research partners using principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR). Most accessible technology research approaches include the target population as end-users, not as community partners. This paper describes how CBPR can enhance designs and increase likelihood of effective and efficiency of end-user designs or prototypes that impact students in education. We conclude with a discussion on how to empower students as research partners using CBPR principles.

The proliferation of new devices over the last decade has introduced new ways of interaction such us tactile (iPhone [1]) or touchless gesture (Kinect [2]) user interfaces. This opens up new opportunities for the education of children with special needs. However, it also raises new issues. On the one hand, children have to be able to manage different technologies, some of which do not enable natural ways of interaction. On the other hand, software developers have to design applications compatible with many different platforms. This paper offers a state-of-the-art discussion about how new interaction paradigms are being applied in the field of education. As a preliminary conclusion, we have detected the need for a standard on gesture-based interfaces. With this in mind, we propose a roadmap setting out the essential steps to be followed in order to define this standard based on natural hand movements.

InStep is an Open Source video database assessment tool designed to provide reliable assessment for students with LLDD in areas not covered by traditional measures. Videos of students undertaking specific activities are shown side-by-side so that changes in development over time can be seen. InStep has been trialled to measure how well teachiers can take suitable videos, the reliability of the assessments and whether learners and their parents could recognise progress using the tool.

The provision of alternate formats for students with print-based disabilities can be challenging. Producing educational material in alternate formats is often time consuming, expensive and requires special knowledge and training of staff. Therefore, in most settings, students are dependent on others, such as disability service personnel or external producers, to obtain their academic materials in their preferred accessible format. Even with these resources available, students may still encounter delays in receiving their alternate formats in a timely manner. For example, a student receiving an inaccessible version of a hand-out or other academic content from a professor on a Friday afternoon may be required to wait until the next business week to receive an accessible version of the document as most institutions or external providers do not run their alternate format production centres seven days per week, year-round. The RoboBraille service offers fully automated conversion of text into a number of alternate formats allowing the individual student to be independent. This paper describes how the RoboBraille Service was turned into a self-service solution for students at Stanford University, called the Stanford Converter into Braille and E-Text – or SCRIBE. The overall purpose of SCRIBE is to encourage students to become self-sufficient by simplifying the production of accessible formats.

Digital materials can help blind and visually impaired students to participate in e-learning and collaborative settings. The use of multimedia content enhances the learning experience of sighted students, but new barriers arise for the visually impaired. This paper describes surveys on e-learning and collaborative settings, defines existing barriers and presents a survey on the use of computer usage, e-learning and collaborative learning amongst 42 blind and visually impaired users in educational and professional life.

In mainstreamed lectures, deaf students face decision-making challenges in shifting attention from looking at the visual representation of the lecture audio, i.e., sign language interpreter or captions. They also face challenges in looking at the simultaneous lecture visual source, i.e., slides, whiteboard or demonstration. To reduce the decision-making challenge for deaf student subjects, we analyze the efficacy of using hearing students’ eye gaze and target as reference cues in lectures. When deaf students view the same lectures with reference cues, they show less delay in switching to the active visual information source and report high satisfaction with the reference cues. The students who liked the cued notifications were more likely to demonstrate reduction in delay time associated with shifting visual attention.

The Musibraille Project was created to address the difficulties to include blind students in music courses in Brazil. The strategy of this project involves the development of powerful software for Braille music edition, building of an online library of Braille music and the application of intensive courses on music transcription, both for blind and non-blind people. This project is producing an extraordinary effect on revitalizing Braille Music in this country, with hundred of teachers and students already trained.

This paper explains three new important enhancements to Synote, the freely available, award winning, open source, web based application that makes web hosted recordings easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for learners, teachers and other users. The facility to convert and import narrated PowerPoint PPTX files means that teachers can capture and caption their lectures without requiring institution-wide expensive lecture capture or captioning systems. Crowdsourcing correction of speech recognition errors allows for sustainable captioning of any originally uncaptioned lecture while the development of an integrated mobile speech recognition application enables synchronized live verbal contributions from the class to also be captured through captions.

Utilizing invisible 2-dimensional codes and digital audio players with a 2-dimensional code scanner, we developed two types of new auditory testing media. The result of experimental evaluation of the new testing media shows that, in addition to existing special accommodations such as large-print-format test and braille-format test, the introduction of the new auditory testing media enables all test-takers with print disabilities, including the newly blind, the severely partially sighted and the dyslexic, to take the National Center Test for University Admissions.

Blind people generally access written information linearly – through Braille or speech/audio. Math can be written in linear form, e.g. LaTeX, MathML, computer programming languages, or word descriptions. These forms are too verbose to be practical for reading any but the simplest math equations. They are even worse for authoring or "doing pencil and paper math". Braille is more useful, but relatively few blind people are fluent in any of the many special Braille math codes, none of which is robust enough for back-translation to be useful for authoring math. The authors of this paper have developed a very compact notation, which could be the basis of a new math Braille font, but which is useful today for reading / writing using computers with all common speech screen readers. Translators to/from MathML have been written and integrated with Microsoft Word / MathType. Preliminary usability data will be reported.

Although DAISY is an excellent solution for various print-disabled people, producing DAISY content is not necessarily accessible works. In particular, it is almost impossible for them to edit technical DAISY content such as mathematics. Here, a new accessible authoring tool to enable both of sighted people and the print disabled to produce/edit easily a DAISY book ranging from mathematics to others is shown. In it, since a new function to control speech output is implemented, all the content is read out in a correct manner with speech synthesis. This approach can be applied also to DAISY content in many languages other than English or Japanese.

This article focuses on the accessibility of study materials containing mathematics to visually impaired students and students with learning disabilities. The electronic editable document (EED) is introduced within the legislative frame of the "Rules for providing support to the public universities" in the Czech Republic. An idea how to fulfil the requirements of EED by creating a document combining structured text in MS Word with mathematics in LaTeX code is presented. For this purposes it is necessary to define strict and simple rules for LaTeX keeping the code translatable. Basic principles of Czech standard for mathematics in Braille are presented as an inspiration.

A system is described for extracting and matching mathematical formulas presented orally during a lecture with those simultaneously displayed on the lecture room screen. Each mathematical formula spoken by the lecturer and displayed on the screen is extracted and shown to the transcriber. Investigation showed that, in a lecture in which many mathematical formulas were presented, about 80% of them were both spoken and pointed to on the screen, meaning that the system can help a transcriber correctly transcribe up to 80% of the formulas presented. A speech recognition system is used to extract the formulas from the lecturer’s speech, and a system that analyzes the trajectory of the end of the stick pointer is used to extract the formulas from the projected images. This information is combined and used to match the pointed-to formulas with the spoken ones. In testing using actual lectures, this system extracted and matched 71.4% of the mathematical formulas both spoken and displayed and presented them for transcription with a precision of 89.4%.

This paper focuses on how to improve accessibility for Braille readers on Internet. We criticize actual technologies and show their limits in scientific Braille and Braille personnalization, especially in pedagogical situations. We present NAT Braille, a free software solution designed to respond to pedagogical specific needs. The transcribing process uses a set of customizable XSLT transformations and several XML formats. We detail the design of NAT Braille and the technologies used for transcriptions. Then we explain why NAT Braille improves personnalization in Braille rendering on Internet. We give the example of our Mozilla extension which is able to transcribe web pages including MathML markup, and is set up with adapted transcription rules taking into account the user’s preferences. We conclude by raising issues related to our work.

In this paper we describe a multi-layer system that is designed to help students who have moderate to severe visual impairments learn algebra while manipulating algebraic equations through an interactive non-visual web-based workspace. The functional algebraic transformation options provided in the in-teractive system through its various layers, and the carefully provided help as-sociated to each of those domain specific manipulation functions enhanced the overall process by which students who are visually impaired learn and deal with solving equations in the developed non-visual workspace.

This article belongs to the field of Human-Computer Inter- action, in the context of the access to Mathematics for people with visual disabilities. In a school scenario, the students with blindness who learn Algebra need to work on mathematical expressions, to collaborate and to communicate with their classmates and teacher. This interaction is not straightforward between students with and without sight, due to the different modalities they use in order to represent mathematical contents and to work with them. The computer presents a great opportunity to promote this type of interaction, because it allows the multimodal representation of mathematical contents. After the conduction of experiments on linear equation solving with students with and without sight, we have modelled their intentions and actions and we present a proposal for the interactions required in a multimodal interface serving this purpose. Lastly, we consider the possibilities and limitations for implementation.

To investigate appropriate representation of numerical data to blind people, a user experiment was conducted. Its results have shown that embossed graphs give quicker and correct access to the data than braille and electronic tables. Based on this observation, we started developing software for creation of embossed graphs which can be operated by blind people. Up until now line graphs can be created with this software.

This paper propose expression rules to describe directed graphs for communication without visual information and corresponding explanation documents. The structures of directed graphs are often complicated especially when they describe visual contents. For the importance of the nodes and edges in these directed graphs, an evaluation method is proposed and this will simplify the structures of the graphs.

In this paper, we present a survey of the material used in the computer sciences lectures of two blind students showing that they have to deal with a high number and various types of UML diagrams. We also report on different textual representations of UML and present our own solutions. Moreover, we point at a current initiative, BLINDUML, which works at solutions for making UMLs accessible.

The AutOMathic Blocks [1] system has been designed to help young blind students learn arithmetic and beginning algebra through the use of tactile [2, 3] blocks that display their work in two-dimensional space. The traditional method of presenting math problem presentation uses special Braille-like codes that present information in a linear form. It is our hypothesis that learning math via a two-dimensional method will expedite and improve the learning experience for young children. Before upgrading our prototype system, we have chosen to first carry out usability testing experiments testing the advantage of using tactile two-dimensional presentation methods.

MathInBraille offers an online portal for converting mathematical formulae and e-Documents with mathematical content into Braille and spoken formats. MathInBraille provides an open conversion service, which can be used for free by anybody what should help to increase access, use and availability of math content for blind people.

This study aims to design Multimedia Computer Assisted Instruction(MCAI)coupled with ARCS (Attention, Relevance, Confidence and Satisfaction) model of learning motivation and to investigate the effects of teaching mathematics using MCAI coupled with ARCS model for elementary school students with disabilities. The participants are recruited from the resource room and general classes. The multiple-probe across behavior design is utilized in the study. The independent variable is the strategies of MCAI coupled with ARCS model, and the dependent variables are the performances of learning mathematics. The results indicated that the MCAI program coupled with ARCS model of learning motivation promotes participants’ mathematics performance.

Within the ETNA project – a European Thematic Network aimed at implementing a EU-wide Portal devoted to ICT-based assistive technologies and e-accessibility solution – a study was carried out to detect the information needs of the various stakeholders involved, such as end-users of assistive technologies, professionals in health, social services and education, manufacturers and developers, policy makers and academic/researchers. Thirty “search profiles” were identified, each related to a specific reason why information may be sought in response to a specific information need that people may encounter at given times. In turn, each profile involves a specific body of information. This study provides a detailed insight in the audience’s expectations, that is guiding the design of the future Portal. The Portal will stem by the existing Portal of the European Assistive Technology Information Network (EASTIN), enriched by the contributions brought by the ETNA project and its “sister” ATIS4All Thematic Network.

The EASTIN Portal – which aggregates the contents of six national databases and make it searchable in 22 European languages – is currently the major information system on assistive technology available in Europe. Its usability has been recently improved through the use of advanced language technologies, thanks to the EU-funded project EASTIN-CL. The project developed three main components (the

query processing

, the

machine translation

, and the

speech output

) that have been implemented and plugged to the existing EASTIN website.

Information technology (IT), especially assistive devices and programs, enable people with disabilities to work. The aim of this study was to determine the knowledge and use of this IT among workers with disabilities in the open labor market. The focus was on the IT accommodation solutions used in workplaces and how these improved the working skills of disabled people. One fourth (27%) of the participants considered their knowledge regarding assistive technology to be very good or good, whereas 39% considered their knowledge to be very poor or poor. Workers with visual disorders were the most aware of assistive technology in computer work. Over half of the respondents indicated that the user interface, display screen, and mouse settings of their computers were not accommodated.

The paper describes a multimodal guidance system whose aim is to improve manual skills of people with specific disorders, such as Down syndrome, mental retardation, blind, autistic, etc. The multimodal guidance system provides assistance in the execution of 2D tasks as for example: sketching, hatching and cutting operations through haptic and sound interactions. The haptic technology provides the virtual path of 2D shapes through the point-based approach, while sound technology provides some audio feedback inputs about his or her actions while performing a manual task as for example: start and/or finish an sketch; some alarms related to the hand’s velocity while sketching and filling or cutting operations. Unskilled people use these interfaces in their educational environment.

To identify barriers to accessibility in Qatar a study was conducted by distributing a survey to 211 persons with disabilities and conducting interviews. Lack of awareness, lack of Assistive Technology in Arabic, inaccessible ATM:s and absence of assistive communication services are the largest barriers.

The European Commissioner with responsibility for the Digital Agenda has declared that she wants to make “Every European Digital” [1] and it is accepted that knowledge of computing is necessary for everyone in the Information Society [2] The knowledge and skills which are needed are often called “digital literacy”. The National Council for the Blind of Ireland (NCBI) has provided training in the use of computers for over 15 years and, in 2010, decided to take part in the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) programme and become an authorised ECDL test centre. ECDL is a standard of digital literacy which is accepted in 146 countries and has been taken by over 12 million people. This paper is a case study of the implementation of the ECDL programme in NCBI.

Post-rehabilitation support aids socio-professional reintegration. Information about options for post-rehabilitation support following stroke is provided by an application based on Wiki-principles and semantic technologies (Virtual Guide). Core feature is a knowledge-management system. Regional health care professionals contribute initial content for the database. User involvement is facilitated by an interface based on internet blog posts describing prototypical situations stroke patients face during post-rehabilitation. On the condition that sufficient users proactively provide regular contributions, the platform will, ideally, develop into a living system representing regional infrastructures for post-rehabilitation support both accurately and up to date.

We present a novel approach towards

understanding

and

design

of

interactive music technology

for people with special needs. The health effects of music are well documented, but little research and interactive music technology has been developed, for Music Therapy and health improvement in everyday situations. Further, the music technology that has been used, exploits little of the potential current computer technology has to offer the Music and Health and Music Therapy fields, because it is designed and used based on a narrow perspective on technology and its potential. We present and argue for a broader understanding of music technology for empowerment and health improvement, building on a multidisciplinary approach with perspectives from Tangible interaction design,

empowerment

and

resource oriented

Music Therapy. We call this approach

Musicking Tangibles

, inspired by Christopher Small’s term “musicking”. We also present two designed Musicking Tangibles, and argue for their empowering qualities based on user observations.

This paper describes the RHYME project, aimed at children with multiple disabilities, their families and caregivers. The goal in this cross disciplinary project is to create and evaluate platforms for co-creation through music and physical interaction in order to improve health and well being for the participants. The paper has two main contributions: 1) a review and discussion of Participatory Design in Design for All, and 2) Tangible Interaction and

familiarity

as a basis for the possibility of

musicking for all

, for children, their families and caregivers, on individual terms.

Audio Description makes films, shows and TV programs accessible to visually impaired audience. It is expensive so wide adoption of this technology is not practical. Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission requires that broadcaster describes a minimum of four hours of primetime programming a week. Production companies do not see any incentives to move beyond the required minimum. This paper investigates the possibility of making AD profitable by making a described movie, show or program attractive to all kind of audiences including visually impaired. We argue that AD can become a revenue generation product widely adopted by production companies.

This paper presents a project i-Space about learning and playful ap-plications, which could also document performance. The target group is mentally impaired citizens. The project is used as reference to a discussion on structures within innovation processes. This discussion leads to a discussion of the user as a sense-making category in multi-disciplinary settings.

This STS on

Virtual User Models for designing and using of inclusive products

is targeted towards generic interoperable user models that describe the relevant characteristics of users, who will interact with products and user interfaces. A user profile is an instantiation of a user model representing either a specific user or a representative of a group of users ‎[1]. With such a model designers can define as many user profiles as needed to address the whole range of requirements from a target population in order to maximize the level of accessibility of products and services according to the selected user profile. The papers in this STS address many of the issues addressed by the VUMS cluster of projects. The cluster is formed by four projects funded by the European Commission under the Theme "FP7-ICT-2009.7.2 Accessible and Assistive ICT"; the projects are VICON, MyUI, GUIDE and VERITAS (http://www.veritas-project.eu/vums/).

The development of products that are accessible to the largest possible group of users can be regarded as a major challenge for manufacturers of consumer products. It is therefore crucial, that the product development process is supported by practical methods and tools that can help incorporate these essential human factors in early phases of the development process. Ergonomics evaluation and user testing with real users are user centred design methodologies often conducted by companies that are not only complex, but can be very time and cost-intensive. As an alternative approach virtual user models (VUM) have been proposed for supporting the early phases of the product development process. In this paper we will present the model-based design approach of the European research project VICON supporting inclusive design of consumer products particularly at the early stages of product development.

The paper presents a highly novel user modeling framework for the detailed description of geometric, kinematic, physical, behavioral and cognitive aspects of users affected by disabilities and elderly. Several aspects of the user’s interaction behavior are examined, while user models are quantified, in terms of their kinematics and dynamics parameters, in tests with disabled users through a multisensorial platform, in order to develop accurate and realistic virtual user models. Hierarchical Task and Interaction Models are introduced, in order to describe the user’s capabilities in multiple scales of abstraction. The use of al-ternative ways of a user task’s execution, using different modalities and assistive devices, are also supported by the proposed task analysis.

This paper focuses on the description of the approach used to parameterize the psychological and behavioural user models developed under the FP7 EU Founded project VERITAS: Virtual and Augmented Environments and Realistic User Interactions To achieve Embedded Accessibility DesignS. The present paper will focus on the methodology used to define the relevant psychological and behavioural parameters within the context of VERITAS. Two complementary approaches have been selected: on one hand, the use of existing models of the cognitive architecture Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (ACT-R) for cognitive simulation purposes; on the other hand, a second approach based on existing metrics coming from medical and human behavior studies and biomedical models.

Software development is increasingly focusing its design on users suffering from different kinds of disabilities or impairments, as it is the case for the elderly or handicapped people for instance. Real-time adaptable graphical user interfaces is a promising solution for designing accessible applications for users with special needs. Essentially, collecting context information and combining it with information about the user can be used to customize the content of the interface itself, and so it allows improving the user experience in his interaction with the application.

The EU-funded FP7 MyUI project has emerged in the adaptive graphical interfaces domain, addressing important barriers which include the developers’ lack of awareness and expertise, time and cost requirements of incorporating accessibility and missing validated approaches and infrastructures of accesible software design. This paper presents the technology used and the experiences collected in the integration process of a regular application into such a framework.

Evaluation of application accessibility is a challenging task that requires an intensive testing with potential application users. An alternative to user tests is the model based testing using simulations. The simulations provide important feedback about application accessibility particularly when it is hard to involve the target users in the tests which is often the case for users with disabilities. In this paper we propose a methodology of providing the quickly and easily necessary data for the simulations. In particular we show how to annotate task models using application walkthroughs logs that is data obtained by recording the application usage. We create annotated task models, which together with the user models are suitable for simulation of application usage by virtual users with various disabilities. We present tools for recording and processing of the application walkthrough logs and tools for the interactive task model annotation. Finally, we provide actual examples of task model annotation on three scenarios involving the Second Life metaverse.

The Web is rapidly evolving and converging with other media and technologies. Today the Web is on mobile devices, televisions, self-service ter-minals, and computer desktops. It is continuing to be increasingly ubiquitous and indistinguishable from other interfaces and became an ambient part of our daily lives, particularly with the advancement of "the cloud”. Thus, there is a need for developers and designers to better understand the relationship and overlap of the existing accessibility methodologies, and introduce Web accessibility in advanced and mainstream technologies for providing accessible products that work better for people who experience difficulties and changes in their abilities due to aging.

This short paper introduces the idea, the main tool and the work of the EU-supported

eAccess+

network (www.eaccessplus.eu) for fostering the uptake of eAccessibility in Europe. The rationale for the network starts from the fact that a considerable and elaborated body of knowledge, established in the eAccessibility and Assistive Technology domain, exists but is rarely implemented in mainstream design. There are many reasons for this situation and the network is working to identify and address them and to start processes to remedy the situation.

We propose a method to improve Web Accessibility. First, we generate a list of Cascading Style Sheet CSS for Websites depending on user’s needs and meaningful contextual information. Second, we rank this list in order to best fit with the current user. In order to provide means for that, formally connected knowledge in user interaction processes are used to support a reasoning unit, which is based on Answer Set Programming (ASP). Finally, visual aspects of user interfaces such as sizes of user interface elements, colours, relative position of the elements or navigation devices are specified. In Web environments, user interface adaptation is needed to tailor user interfaces to older people’s needs and impairments while preserving their independence.

This paper presents the elaboration of a model for a progressive implementation of WCAG, centered on the notions of access to information and essential users’ needs. MIPAW’s main goal is to serve as a framework for the elaboration of gradual implementation methodologies, of systems measuring the real level of accessibility, and the setting up of efficient quality assurance management systems. It is based on state of the art, real-world experience, and expertise in accessibility as well as quality assurance. The project aims at providing methodological tools better suited to the constraints of web industrialization, while preserving the deployment of real user-centric accessibility. MIPAW is a project lead as part of the activities of the AccessiWeb GTA (Workgroup on Accessibility), and has received active support from 16 of the most prominent French companies in the area of expertise in digital accessibility.

In the last years, TVs have become platforms providing content and entertainment services, such as video on demand, interactive advertising or so-cial networking. Often, these services are Web based applications that run of connected TVs or set-top boxes. Given TV’s wide reach, it is paramount TV applications are designed so that information can be perceived by everyone, i.e. should be accessible. These applications increasingly present dynamic aspects, which have been rendering traditional Web evaluation approaches obsolete. Additionally, TV based interaction has specificities that Web based evaluation is unable to cope with. In this paper, we present an automated accessibility evaluation framework to address these challenges. It is based on WCAG 2.0 and Digital TV guidelines. It supports evaluation of the code after browser processing and scanning the whole set of application states. It is capable of evaluating user interface adaptation based on selected user profiles. The paper also presents the evaluation results of three TV based applications according to the proposed framework, which allow a comparison of results of pre and post browser processing as well as pre and post adaptation.

Current leisure or touristic services searching tools do not take into account the special needs of large amount of people with functional diversities. However, the combination of different semantic, web and storage technologies make possible the enhancement of such search tools, allowing more personalized searches. This contributes to the provision of better and more suitable results. In this paper we propose an innovative ontology driven solution for personalized tourism directed to people with special needs.

Accessibility is unfortunately not among the main concern when developing web sites. Webmasters create mostly involuntarily numerous obstacles for people with visual impairments. That’s why it becomes fundamental to identify the existing barriers and to propose solutions in order to at least diminish their impact to the user. Accessibility guidelines, as WCAG 2.0, indicate that a minimum difference of brightness, tonality and contrast is necessary to reach a minimum level of accessibility. In numerous cases, web designers ignore or just limit their choices to a low level of accessibility. For an user needing a higher level of accessibility than the one offered by the web page, the access to information may be difficult. In this context, we propose to transform the colors of web pages according to user’s needs with the help of a client-side HTTP proxy. The requirements for the colors can be expressed as a fitness function. In order to recolor the page to increase accessibility, it’s enough to minimize the fitness function.

Trying to find a minimum can be a time consuming task not appropriate for real time recoloring. Finding a minimum can be considered as a search with varying time limits. In this article, our objective is to compare different search methods and their performance under time limit: the search can be interrupted at any time. The studied methods are a random search, different types of pseudo gradient descend and an adaptation of the API metaheuristic. Finally, the different methods are compared.

Unfortunately, accessibility is not one of designers priorities while developing web sites, resulting in barriers for numerous disabled users. In this context, it is fundamental to identify the difficulties they may experience while surfing web and to propose solutions in order to remove them or diminish their impact. The choice of colors is far from being a random process but often a way to transmit or emphase information. This is particulary true for textual information contained in a web page. The perception of colors by a dichromat user is different. This results in a loss of the information conveyed by color. In our study, we show that there is a significant loss of contrast for a dichromat user resulting in information loss. We propose a method based on a mass-spring simulation to modify the colors with aim to enforce similar contrast for dichromat users. Tests on several websites allow us to conclude that our method significantly reduce the loss of contrast for both protanope and deuteranope users.

The German BIENE award (Barrierefreies Internet Eröffnet Neue Einsichten / Accessible Internet Provides New Insights), a best practice compe-tition for accessible websites organized by the social association “Aktion Mensch” and the endowment “Digitale Chancen” enters into a new competitive phase. For the 2010 competition 224 web pages have been checked for their barrier free accessibility. Web applications that facilitate interactive sharing of

user generated content

are of particular importance, when it comes to Web 2.0 technologies. In this respect it soon turned out, that Web 2.0 services cannot only be made accessible by applying common design guidelines and ad-hoc adap-tations. In addition to conventional software ergonomic verification procedures, accessibility validation has to rely on sociological reasoning about unique Web 2.0 entities and corresponding usage obstacles. Empirically these considerations have been conceptualized by an online survey amongst 671 respondents with all kinds of different disabilities, carried out by “Aktion Mensch”.

Despite the general popularity of online shopping, its usage is not entirely granted to all user groups. In this context, especially consumers with visual impairments are often faced with challenging barriers. To provide a better understanding of their actual needs and to identify experienced difficulties, personal in-depth interviews were conducted with visually impaired users. The obtained results of this empirical qualitative study form a knowledge base of consumer insights, which can be further used as a source for target-group specific improvements and innovations.

In many situations it is useful to measure the level of accessibility of websites using a more continual scale rather than the rather limited set of four ordinal values (none, A, AA, and AAA) proposed by the W3C/WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). For example, a continual scale allows more granular benchmarking of websites to compare them or to help assess improvements made over time. However, finding reliable metrics is a non-trivial challenge for a variety of reasons. This paper introduces a Special Thematic Session to explore this challenge, further to a previously held online symposium of the W3C/WAI Research and Development Working Group (RDWG).

Explicit syntax and implicit semantics of Web coding are typically addressed as distinct dominions in providing metrics for content accessibility. A more down-to-earth portrait about barriers and their impact on users with disa-bilities could be obtained whether any quantitative synthesis about number and size of barriers integrated measurements from automatic checks and human as-sessments. In this work, we present a metric to evaluate accessibility as a unique meas-ure of both syntax correctness and semantic consistence, according to some general assumptions about relationship and dependencies between them. WCAG 2.0 guidelines are used to define boundaries for any single barrier eval-uation, either from a syntactic point of view, or a subjective/human one. In or-der to assess our metric, gathered data form a large scale accessibility monitor has been utilized.

The paper presents a new metric and a framework to assess the effort of repairing the accessibility of a Web site. For that all the HTML elements of all the pages of a site are considered, excluding those that are duplicated. The rationale is that those elements are originated in a reusable construct, such as a template and, therefore, need to be corrected only once. The evaluation then ap-plies the accessibility evaluation techniques on those elements instead of on all the instances that are presented to the user. The reported fails and warnings are then computed in a simple sum metric.

The paper also describes the validation experiment of both metric and framework, providing very important results. These may well contribute to a different perspective from managers and development team leaders about the effort to revamp the accessibility of a site.

We show that a recently introduced lexical quality measure is also valid to measure textual Web accessibility. Our measure estimates the lexical quality of a site based in the occurrence in English Web pages of a set of more than 1,345 words with errors. We then compute the correlation of our measure with Web popularity measures to show that gives independent information. This together with our previous results implies that this measure maps to some of the WCAG principles of accessibility.

The current development of the Internet and its growing use makes it necessary to satisfy the needs of all users including those with disabilities having accessibility problems. The healthy lifestyle is increasingly important to people. The number of webpages dealing with healthy lifestyles is growing. “Webstar” healty lifestyle social network was tested by Wave Toolbar, HTML Validator, Web Developer Toolbarand WCAG Contrast Checker.

This paper presents a conceptual analysis of how the

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0

and its accompanying documents can be used as a basis for the implementation of an automatic checking tool and the definition of a web accessibility metric. There are two major issues that need to be resolved to derive valid and reliable conclusions from the output of individual tests. First, the relationship of Sufficient Techniques and Common Failures has to be taken into account. Second, the logical combination of the techniques related to a Success Criterion must be represented in the results.

The eGovMon project has a lot of experience in specifying and implementing tools for automatic checking of web accessibility. The project is based on the belief that web accessibility evaluation is not an end in itself. Its purpose is to promote web accessibility and initiate improvements.

The kids of the first generation who grew up with computer games are now in their forties, and younger people have been surrounded by more and more devices allowing to use such games. The descendants of our old game stations which were displaying 2 bars on a black and white TV set to play tennis, are now very close to very powerful computers. Games appeared also on websites and mobile phones, while portable game stations allow some amazing visual features. The budgets of some of the major games have reached the level of motion pictures, and a huge number of small games are developed every year. Computer games are now in the heart of the youngsters culture. At the same time one could observe also that a growing part of the population of other age groups are using computer games. Indeed a lot of software application implementing the games the people of these older groups want to play have been designed and became more and more simple to use, while the people of these groups have been familiarised to computer at their work. Therefore it’s not rare to see retired people playing scrabble online or card games.

Universal design is a significant topic of interest in the research of accessibility. However, to date there are no certain verification of these principles on the accessibility issues for computer games. In this paper the existing universal design principles were verified to assess accessibility in computer games. Quantitative analysis of collected data showed that some design principles are not really optimal for assessing computer games’ accessibility while other design principles were overlooked. The findings from this study take the argument of alternation of existing universal design principles further ahead and initializes the possibilities of developing accessible games design principles.

In this paper, a learning project is explained which is being carried out at the school of computer science at the University of Seville. The aim is that students receive knowledge of assistive technologies when in fact there is no this discipline in our curricula. So the best way, it is programming final studies projects in this field. We want to make the projects have a real application and can solve difficulties that children with Cerebral Palsy have in their daily activities in the school.

People with mobility disabilities can hardly play any of the mainstream computer and video games. For most of them, special developed games are the only chance to play games. So, playing together with friends or the family is only possible on a very limited way.

Within the Project AsTeRICS, a flexible and affordable construction set for the implementation of user driven assistive technologies solutions will be developed. This allows the combination of different sensors to process and manipulate the sensor data to control any supported device. This paper will show, how a Sony PlayStation 3 can become the supported device, and how the requirements of a mainstream game can be tailored to the possibilities of a disabled person. Furthermore, possible limitations of this solution will be discussed.

Auditory music is a universal art form that has spanned millennia. Music provides an insight into the collective culture of a society and acts as a vehicle to transmit shared knowledge that is common to all members of society. People who are deaf, deafened or hard of hearing tend to have a limited access to music and as a result can be excluded from this shared knowledge and cultural experience. A music visualization system, MusicViz, was developed based on a model of audio-visual sensory substitution. An evaluation of six different music genres showed that the visualizations were enjoyable and able to convey some information and emotions to the participants.

Driven by the ongoing integration of computers into the daily lives of blind people, the reading experience has been undergoing a significant shift from Braille to synthetic speech. While it is true that speech involves less effort on the part of the reader, the downside is that it creates the illusion of completeness of information while in truth many important elements of layout, punctuation, and spelling are lost. The presentation introduces an application of Active Tactile Control which revolves around the medium of music and is designed in such a way that students can only succeed if they mentally translate auditive impressions into Braille characters.

In this work we present enhanced hearing instruments (HIs) that provide vibrotactile feedback behind the user’s ears in parallel to sound. Using an additional feedback modality we display dedicated vibrotactile patterns to support the user in localizing sound sources. In a study with 4 HI users and 5 normal hearing participants we deploy the system in a gaming scenario. The open source availability of the mainstream 3D first person shooter game used in the study allowed us to add code for accessibility. We evaluate the system qualitatively with user questionnaires and quantitatively with performance metrics calculated from statistics within the game. The system was perceived as beneficial and allowed the HI users to achieve gaming performance closer to that of normal hearing participants.

The generalisation of user-friendly and mobile interfaces like smart phones, eBook readers and tablets has accelerated the transition of comic books to the digital format. Although such user interfaces are not always fit for use by people with special needs, the underlying platform offers a large number of innovative services which opens a wide spectrum of new possibilities for enhancing accessibility.

This paper explores how these new technologies can improve the digital access to comic books. Our main contribution is the inclusion of optical character recognition within text bubble associated to comics characters. The recognised text can then be fed into a text-to-speech engine for an improved experience. We also details performance improvements of other functionalities such as the panel order detection and special backgrounds. Finally, we discuss how these application specific adaptations can be applied to other contexts and which kind of future deployment can be anticipated.

When working with youngsters with intellectual disabilities, it is often a challenge to teach them ‘boring’ content (e.g. the ‘rules of daily living’ in their school or care-center). In this paper we propose a serious gaming approach in order to facilitate the learning process. The novelty in our concept is that we decouple the game and the didactical content, which allows us to transfer the learning to the youngster’s leisure time. In our research, we built a framework containing several (fun) games and an administration environment that facilitates the creation of learning content. In a user experiment, measuring the user’s joy and motivationwe found that the subjects enjoyed playing the games and were very attentive when the didactical content appeared.

OpenOffice.org Writer and LibreOffice Writer both implement the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and support output formats such as PDF and XHTML. Through the extensions odt2daisy and odt2braille (developed in the context of the AEGIS project) Writer can also export to DAISY (audio books) and Braille. In order to output usable DAISY or Braille, authors first need to create an accessible source document. The objective of AccessODF, the accessibility checker developed in the context of the European AEGIS project, is to support authors in creating accessible ODF documents and to prepare these documents for conversion to DAISY and/or Braille. The paper discusses the user interface options that were explored, describes how authors can repair errors and warnings, gives examples of automatic and semi-automatic repairs supported by the checker, and describes which errors and warnings are implemented.

Generally, a hearing impaired person is supported by staffs to take a note while hearing a lecture. However, the lecture note cannot express a tone of the teacher’s voice. Further, non-verbal information such as a chatting voice in a classroom, speed, loudness and tone of speaker’s voice are also difficult to express. As a result, it is difficult for a hearing impaired person to feel the atmosphere in the classroom. In this study, we develop a system to inform atmosphere in the classroom to a hearing impaired person. The system utilizes expression techniques used in Japanese cartoons; they are “Ambient Font”, “Balloon & Symbols” and “Onomatopoeic Word”. These techniques enable us to inform to the hearing impaired person not only the textual information but also the non-verbal information.

The production of high quality Braille documents is time consuming because it often involves a lot of manual work to be done on the text. To increase the global number of Braille documents available to end-users, special efforts have to be done to automate as most as possible the production processes. At the mean time, the documents quality should not decrease, because Braille is often used in learning situations where errors are harmful for the users. This paper will present recent advances and current developments made in the field of Braille production. Especially, XML-based formats useful to create complex Braille documents will be introduced. Next, some tools operating on these formats will be described, and finally, we will underline the need and the possibility to create fully integrated production workflows based on these tools and formats.

There are many pupils with reading difficulty in Japanese schools. The dyslexia is the disability about reading and writing texts. We use Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana characters in Japanese sentences. We propose the Japanese text presentation system that eases the difficulties about reading Japanese texts with or without dyslexia. The kanji is an ideograph. The hiragana and the katakana are phonograms. The reading difficulties include 2 types. One is a difficulty about reading the kanji. Another is the difficulty about tracing the reading sequence. This paper proposes a system that presents the Japanese sentences with suitable presentation method for each pupil with reading difficulties. The main function of the proposed system is 3 levels of highlighting/masking that are independently controlled. The highlighting only is not enough to prevent the error about the reading sequence of character chunks. The 3 level highlighting/masking enables to adapt the presentation to wide varieties of reading difficulties. This paper proposes the design and the experiments of the Japanese text presentation system on the students without reading difficulty.

From the perspective of assistive Technology, the hierarchical document tree structure is particularly relevant to represent a document’s logical structure. This research proposes a way of realizing advantages attainable from making use of the logical structure of documents by developing a method of presenting the tree structure information of a document on a braille display. The document browser software developed for this research operates as a DAISY player. Experimentation found that using a user interface of that document browser software improves the efficiency of understanding the document’s general structure and finding headings when compared to the user interface of a conventional DAISY player with numeric keypad cursor navigation. Not just the DAISY contents, the proposed user interface can be used for general-purpose applications.

In this paper we present Acce-Play: a system that aims to provide accessible content to all life cycle of films. It is designed to be platform independent and currently allows to play accessible content in cinemas. The content is synchronized with the playing film using audio fingerprinting techniques with the projector audio stream.

In this paper we present an automatic text simplification system for Spanish which intends to make texts more accessible for users with cognitive disabilities. This system aims at reducing the structural complexity of Spanish sentences in that it converts complex sentences in two or more simple sentences and therefore reduces reading difficulty.

Music is an art form present in all cultures and a shared experience. People who are Deaf, Deafened, or Hard of Hearing (D/HOH) do not have full access to the music of the larger hearing cultures in which they live. As a consequence, access to this shared experience and the cultural knowledge it contains is lost. As a result of an increasingly aging global population the number of D/HOH people is growing creating a consumer need for improved access to music information. Challenging the notion that music is only something that can be heard, this paper reviews the state of the art for supporting D/HOH music consumers and describes a study conducted with HOH music consumers to determine how best to support their needs. Results show that HOH people have several difficulties accessing music.

Many people make photographs of places they visited and when they are browsing the collections they can not often remember the names of buildings on the pictures. There also exist people with visual impairment interested in a photography[1].

This paper deals with the algorithms and methods they can allow people with visual impairment to photograph. They allow to automatically add a semantic description of buildings on a photography and to browse the collection of photographs taken this way even by visually impaired users using the semantic description.

The LIA Project – Libri Italiani Accessibili is a biennial project started in 2011. It aims at providing a service to increase availability on the market of digital publications accessible to blind and visually impaired, in full respect of the rights of authors and publishers.

Social Media has great promise for facilitation of inclusion and participation for all. With this Special Topic Session, we wanted to address two perspectives on social media and inclusion: accessibility

to

social media on various device configurations, and inclusion

through use

of and engagement in social media. The papers in this STS falls into two broad categories. Three of four papers mostly look at the accessibility of social media, either with design guidelines, methodological considerations or surveys as central contributions. The fourth paper looks more closely at a case where computers and multimedia is used rehabilitation studies. This introduction provides a short introduction to social media and technology development, the scope of the STS, and a summary of the included papers.

The use of new information and communication technologies can improve learning with dynamic, creative strategies. New knowledge will be obtained by exercising the mind, i.e., using the two cerebral hemispheres by neuroplasticity, in a dynamic, intense and active way. It is necessary to show that computer can be used as a means of exercising the mind through different activities and can be also used in pedagogical practices with the purpose of making learning easier. It offers ways that are alternative to those offered by school for students, with or without special necessities, to develop their capacities and potentialities. The computer can be used to develop several activities, which are complex and allow the development of many abilities that help in the solution of problems and make students learn more from their mistakes. These activities will help students develop self-confidence and improve their creative actions and be independent.

Social medias are a central arena for participation, in social life, politics, business and working life. This paper aims to document the social media use among people with visual impairments (VI) in Norway, and to explore some barriers and motivational factors to the use of social media for this group. We present results from two surveys about social media usage among people with VI. One telephone survey was conducted among 150 members of the Norwegian Association of the Blind and Partially Sighted (NABP). This survey contained questions about social media usage. The results from this quantitative survey are discussed in light of results from a web survey with more open-ended questions. The web survey was about how disabled people in Norway use social media, and what accessibility and usability challenges they experience. Through the web survey informants brings to the surface some important accessibility issues and adds nuances to the overall picture. While the telephone survey shows that a high percentage of people with VI participate in social media, the web-based survey indicate they face a variety of problems and typically use the core functionality only. Together, these two surveys give a broad picture of social media usage among people with visual impairments in Norway.

The use of social media has in recent years increased dramatically. It is imperative that social media are accessible to all. To ensure this, it is important to conduct user testing as part of an accessibility and usability assessment of social media services. This paper focuses on the methodology applied in such undertakings, and its purpose is to draw attention to important aspects that should guide user testing and user studies of social media services. This is done by sharing the experiences gained in the project Net Citizen. The main target groups for the paper are those planning the implementation of social media services and those who conduct accessibility and usability user testing. Key findings are that cumulative usability issues can be likened to poor accessibility. Further, that web services that are accessible in a strict technical sense, may not necessarily be perceived as accessible by real users.

Social Media provide a vast amount of information identifying stories, events, entities that play the crucial role of shaping the community in an everyday heavy user involvement. This work involves the study of social media information in terms of type (multimodal: text, video, sound, picture) and role players (agents, users, opinion leaders) and the potential of designing accessible, usable interfaces that integrate that information. This case examines the design of a user interface that uses an underlying engine for modality components (plain text, sound, image, video) analysis, social media crawling, contextual search fusion and semantic analysis. The interface is the only point of user interaction to the world of knowledge. This work reports on the usability and accessibility methods and concerns for the user requirements phase and the design control and testing. The findings of the pilot user testing and evaluation provide indications on how the semantic analysis of the social media information can be integrated to the design methodologies for user interfaces resulting in maximization of user experience in terms of social information involvement.

Short introduction to the Special Thematic Session about the new ISO standard for PDF accessibility and how PDF/UA changes the game for document software developers, assistive technology vendors, decision-makers, organizations in the public and private sector, accessibility experts, publishers, authors and last but not least the end-users.

PDF/UA-1 is an upcoming ISO standard defining accessible PDF. It claims to apply principles established by W3C’s WCAG 2.0 to the world of PDF documents. This paper discusses a mapping table between WCAG 2.0 Success Criteria and clauses in the PDF/UA-1 standard to point out, how and why PDF/UA-1 can indeed be described as an application of WCAG 2.0 principles to PDF. It is to be expected that this as a consequence will speed up adoption of PDF/UA-1 in the field of accessible electronic content.

axesPDF for Word is an add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 and Word 2010 allowing to create high quality accessible PDF documents according to guidelines like WCAG 2.0 and standards like PDF/UA. It is characterized by a specific role model, a rule based transformation instead of static conversion and the possibility of n:m-mapping. Even complex documents with elements like footnotes, side notes, captions, references, indices and glossaries can be made accessible without post-processing.

This paper addresses the text customisation needs of people with low vision, dyslexia, and related conditions that impact reading, including people with declining eyesight due to ageing. It reports on a literature review and an initial study that explores the aspects of text that users customize (e.g., size, colour, leading, linearization/reflow, and more) for reading RTF and PDF documents, in operating system settings, and in web browser settings. It presents the gap between users’ needs and PDF user agent (primarily Adobe Reader) functionality. The existing literature and this exploratory study indicate that with the technology currently available, PDF is not sufficiently accessible to many people with low vision, dyslexia, and related conditions that impact reading. This paper aims to encourage additional text customisation functionality in Adobe Reader; and to encourage more rigorous studies to understand, document, and communicate how to better meet users’ text customisation needs through mainstream user agents.

While substantial progress has been made in widely used applications like Microsoft Word or Adobe Indesign, when it comes to creating accessible PDF documents, a number of problems still exist that make it difficult even for motivated users in a real world production situation to invest additional effort to create decently tagged PDF. Improved features and enhanced user interface in these applications could contribute substantially to increase the likelihood that creators of print-oriented PDF files take the extra work on them to also make these PDF files accessible.

The paper shows why validity and semantics matters for a PDF/UA evaluation concept and how an automated checking tool can address this. In order to translate machine-testable requirements into checking criteria a special query language is developed called PQL (PDF Query Language). PQL will be implemented in PDF Accessibility Checker PAC 2, the first and free PDF/UA compliance checker crowd-funded by the foundation “Access for all”.

This paper presents one of two new software plugins for MS PowerPoint and Word documents which allow the analysis of accessibility issues and consequently the generation of fully accessible PDF documents. The document authors using these plugins require no specific accessibility knowledge. This paper introduces the user interface of the Microsoft PowerPoint accessibility plugin. The plugins are based on a flexible software architecture concept that allows the automatic generation of fully accessible PDF documents originating from various authoring tools, such as Adobe InDesign [1], Word and PowerPoint [2], [3]. The accessibility plugin software implemented allows authors to check for accessibility issues while creating their documents and add the additional semantic information needed to generate a fully accessible PDF document.

In this paper, we propose a new privacy preserving automatic fall detection method to facilitate the independence of older adults living in the community, reduce risks, and enhance the quality of life at home activities of daily living (ADLs) by using RGBD cameras. Our method can recognize 5 activities including standing, fall from standing, fall from chair, sit on chair, and sit on floor. The main analysis is based on the 3D depth information due to the advantages of handling illumination changes and identity protection. If the monitored person is out of the range of a 3D camera, RGB video is employed to continue the activity monitoring. Furthermore, we design a hierarchy classification schema to robustly recognize 5 activities. Experimental results on our database collected under conditions with normal lighting, without lighting, out of depth range demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposal method.

In the framework of the EU funded SRS (Multi-Role Shadow Robotic System for independent Living) project, an innovative semi autonomous service robot is under development with the aim to support frail elderly people at their home. This paper reports about the user validation of the SRS concept involving 63 potential users of the system coming from Italy, Germany and Spain: in particular they were frail elderly people, their relatives and 24 hour telecare professionals. Results confirmed that monitoring and managing emergency situations as well as helping with reaching, fetching and carrying objects that are too heavy or positioned in unreachable places are the tasks for which a robot is better accepted to address users’ needs. To support the scenarios executions and operation modes, the interaction concept should provide three different interaction devices and modalities for each user group.

Modeling users in order to design appropriate interfaces and interactions or to simulate a specific user behavior is an ambitious task. When using user model attributes to design an interface as well as its interactions we focus tasks at different levels of complexity. In our work we address the appropriateness of physical, cognitive, behavioral, and psychological attributes and their relevancy for designing and describing tasks at such levels of complexity. We conducted a study that uses tasks of varying complexity levels that we relate to attributes in terms of the categorization previously described. A driving simulator together with a prototype of in-car controls that allows to perform primitive as well as complex tasks during a driving scenario represent the study context and the user interface for the participants who took part in three different scenarios, where they performed selected tasks that have been identified for the automotive area. Further additional workload tasks were used to induce stress and to investigate in the effect of cognitive, behavioral, and psychological attributes. First results show that the physical parameters address mainly primitive tasks. Regarding cognitive, behavioral and psychological parameters, tasks need to be addressed at a more complex level, which was supported by the results of the study. Concluding the relation of primitive tasks to cognitive, behavioral, and psychological attributes is not viable.

Many ICT services older people could derive a benefit from lack of accessibility, adoptability and usability of the user interface concerning arising special needs specific for the target group. AALuis intends to develop an open User Interface Layer that facilitates a dynamically adapted, personalized interaction between an elderly user and any kind of service, with different types of input and output devices and modalities. To achieve this the AALuis User Interface Layer keeps track of changes of a variety of information models to adapt the transformation process from abstract task descriptions to a user interface and to steer the user interaction in a suitable manner. One of the main goals of AALuis is to create and exploit synergies by developing an architecture that allows the easy integration into different established AAL middleware platforms. AALuis aims to significantly contribute to the freedom of choice for end-users of services and users interfaces.

This paper describes a study exploring the multi-touch interaction for older adults. The aim of this experiment was to check the relevance of this interaction versus single-touch interaction to realize object manipulation tasks: move, rotate and zoom. For each task, the user had to manipulate a rectangle and superimpose it to a picture frame. Our study shows that adults and principally older adults had more difficulties to realize these tasks for multi-touch interaction than for single-touch interaction.

The number of older people is growing significantly and accounts for an ever-increasing percentage of the global population [1]. Online social networks are continuously gaining more relevance and presence in everyday life for communication, work and social interaction. Despite those trends, there is little knowledge on how older people use online social networks, and the benefits derived from it or the possible negative impacts [2], [3]. This paper examines how older people use online social networks and the factors which influence this use.

This study introduces a serious game, “Break the Bricks”, which is one of the games planned within the “StrokeBack” project. The aim of this game is to support the rehabilitation process of stroke patients whom have upper limb impairments and damaged psychomotor abilities. In this paper we will present the designing process and the development of the game. We would like to represent the background of serious games, and the planned test methods of “Break the Bricks”. We will also delineate future plans and further work with this game.

With the aim of making speech easier to listen to on a TV receiver, a noble method for back-ground-sound suppression processing was proposed, and the results of evaluation tests using broadcast-program sound showed that a prototype device was able to adjust a suitable level of background sound for elderly people. Our proposed method was able to suppress the magnitude of sound components with low correlation by using 2ch stereo signals and perform gain-control only on the speechless intervals. The preparatory evaluation tests confirm that it is possible to suitably reduce program background volume by the proposed method. On the basis of this result, a device for suppressing background sound by decoding the transport stream (TS) of a broadcast program was prototyped. The results of evaluation tests using this device demonstrate that the magnitude of background sound can be adjusted to a suitable level for elderly people.

Using computerized devices comes quite natural for many users due to the various graphical user interfaces. However, acceptability of graphical user interfaces by elderly, a rapidly growing group of computer users, is a challenging issue due to different levels of impairments experienced. In the literature, providing simplicity is the main focus of the studies that try to address this challenge. In this paper, we study the acceptance of graphical user interfaces for elderly people with different impairments in the context of in-home healthcare systems. We focus on the relation between two main design parameters of a graphical user interface: page complexity, which is the number of interface elements on each page and the page hierarchy, which is the number of the pages to be traced in order to complete a task. For this purpose, we designed two versions of an interface: one version has a high page complexity and the other version is designed to have a high page hierarchy. We asked 18 experiment-subjects, aged between 65 and 95, to complete three tasks, using both versions. Experiment results are evaluated using both objective and subjective metrics. Results show that the flat version is found to be more acceptable by elderly.

In order to foster the relationship between geographically distant grandparents and grandchildren, a prototype of an online platform is developed in an Ambient Assisted Living project. After identifying relevant attributes in the requirements analysis together with older adults and experts for children, we conducted two rounds of user studies in a laboratory setting with older adults. In the studies we were not only interested in the usability of the platform and the older participants’ computer skills, but especially in the experiences the older users have when interacting with and via the platform. As expected, we found a relation between self-rated computer skills and the usability problems. However, the skills were not decisive for experiencing the interaction regarding curiosity, engagement, social connectedness and social presence. Finally, implications for the design of socially connecting online platforms are presented.

Getting older does not mean being merely excluded from digital worlds. Elderly can at least use the current technology to communicate with their friends and family members without toiling, on contrary with joy and easiness. We know this is not true yet. With our research project

kommTUi

we do our part to get closer to this goal. In this paper we present our achievement so far. One of the outcomes is our approach to better design usable and user-sensitive interaction for elderly. We further show how four design workshops, carried out in two years, and tangible user interfaces we developed so far can generate and support playful environments with elderly. We finish our paper with the presentation of the final model of the new devices we are currently developing in our project.

Ambient assisted living holds promising solutions to tackle the problems of an overaging society by providing various smart home as well as computing and internet technologies that support independent living of elderly people. However, the acceptance of these technologies by the group of elderly constitutes a crucial precondition for the success of AAL. The paper presents early results from the project Casa Vecchia which explores the feasibility of AAL within a longitudinal field study with 20 participating households. Thereby observed barriers hindering the acceptance of technologies applied in the project are discussed as well as possible solutions to reduce the entry threshold to assistive technology.