Alexander Henka

Persona Based Accessibility Testing

Web authors have a hard time understanding and applying accessibility guidelines. The guidelines are considered too technical, without providing sufficient support for problem solving. This results in bad usability of Web applications for people who rely on accessibility. In the field of designing Web applications and interfaces, the concept of personas, as a representation of the target audience, is well established. Personas are typically used to describe the user on a personal level, with their needs, preferences and habits. In this poster, we illustrate a new workflow approach for accessibility evaluations. We propose persona-based representations of accessibility guidelines for acceptance tests of Web applications, for web authors to gain understanding on the needs of people with disabilities and thus improve the accessibility of Web applications.

Personalizing Smart Environments

In this work we propose an approach to personalize services in smart homes and the internet of things using the GPIIs preference set to describe an individuals needs and preferences, and adapting a smart environment accordingly.

Using Video Game Patterns to Raise the Intrinsic Motivation to Conduct Accessibility Evaluations

Even though many national and international guidelines exist to support the development of accessible web applications and to provide guidance, a high number of web applications are still inaccessible. For a large number of web authors, it is hard to imagine how persons with disabilities would interact with their web applications. Therefore, people with disabilities often end up not being considered part of a products’ target audience, and accessibility testing is experienced as an additional burden or skipped entirely. In this paper, we present an approach that augments an accessibility evaluation process with video game patterns to raise intrinsic motivation to conduct accessibility tests. This paper describes work in progress and illustrates how video game patterns can be pragmatically transferred and implemented in a non-game environment.

Gaze-Based Real-Time Adaptivity and Adaptability in an eLearning Environment: A Pre-release Insight

As part of the ScienceCampus Tubingen, we conduct empirical research on learning strategies, in particular with regard to system adaptivity. For this purpose, we developed a web-based eLearning platform called ALM (Adaptive Learning Module) which adapts the learning content based on a real-time analysis of the user’s gaze data as observed by an eye-tracker. This paper describes work in progress and provides a technical insight on the state of our platform and how we plan to shape the application for the planned open-source release this fall. In addition to the technical overview, we provide application examples from actual research studies as well as a vision for the productive use of the learning environment for educational topics.

Giving Elderly Access to Smart Environments

An increasing number of devices and applications from the Smart Home and Ambient Assisted Living domain are leaving the experimental state and are reaching commercial viability. These developments come with great opportunities, but also with challenges for elderly and disabled people. In this paper, we propose a holistic approach, using concepts of the Global Public Infrastructure (GPII), the Universal Remote Console (URC) and the upcoming technology of Web Components, to build personalized and adaptive user interfaces for people with special needs. The goal is to provide for everyone the interface fitting best his or her needs. In this paper we present the preliminary result of our approach and discuss its impact on the design of adaptive user interfaces.