2011 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Embedded Cultural Features in the Design of an Accessibility Agent for the Web
Authors : Ingrid Teixeira Monteiro, Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza
Published in: Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Design for All and eInclusion
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
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This paper presents the Web Navigation Helper (WNH), an interface agent for users with special needs originally developed for Brazilian users. WNH mediates scripted interaction with web sites, by providing alternative dialogs with appropriate style, structure, etc. The paper reports the results of qualitative empirical studies done at the early design stages. In particular, it shows how our design vision changed when findings from initial studies revealed that the technology we were about to develop was implicitly guided by a sociability model that was not prevalent in the Brazilian culture. The main contributions of the paper are to expose the process by which we became aware of cultural factors affecting the design of accessibility agents, and to propose a kind of technology that may be adopted in cultures whose sociability models are based on personal relations with friends and family members.