Andreas Stiegler

Accessibility through Preferences: Context-Aware Recommender of Settings

A proposal for merging context-awareness and user preferences in the same software system is provided. Several modules from the on-going CLOUD4All project (European Commission Seventh Framework Programme) are enhanced with Context Awareness, including the Semantic Matching Framework, the RuleBased Matchmaker (with new rules) and the Statistical Matchmaker (with new features to be used as predictors). Some other components are created exclusively to deal with context features, as the Context Aware Server (to add context from motes) and the Minimatchmaker (to save computation and network resources for well-known situations)

Gamification and Accessibility

There are many software requirements for the development of accessible applications, in particular for elderly people or people with disabilities. In particular, user interfaces have to be sufficiently abstract to cover required adaptations. In this paper, we introduce a gamification approach for teaching, connecting and engaging developers on accessible design of applications. A particular challenge hereby is combining gamification patters with the requirements of accessibility. As many gamification patters build on visual representation or usage metaphors, they are not suited for adaptation. Instead, we derive a representation-agnostic set of gamification patters from actual game design of commercial games. We identify and illustrate five categories of representation-agnostic gamification patterns, based on a games survey: action space, reward, challenge, progress, and discovery.

Gamification in the Development of Accessible Software

This paper describes a theoretical framework covering game design, game mechanics and game engines, linking examples from actual commercial games with a gamification application. The goal of the framework is to develop an online platform for software developers to aid them in designing accessible applications, finding help on the topic etc. A software stack will be derived taking a typical game development project as an example. We will further identify process requirements for implementing crucial game design rules, like immediate feedback. Finally, an outlook on the final project will be given and possible evaluation metrics will be described.

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.

Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII) – Personalisierte Benutzerschnittstellen / Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII) – Towards Personal User Interfaces

Zusammenfassung. Moderne Desktop- und mobile Plattformen bieten dem Benutzer die Möglichkeit, Aspekte der Präsentation und der Interaktion individuell zu konfigurieren, um damit die Benutzerschnittstelle zu personalisieren. Allerdings gibt es dazu kaum plattformübergreifende Lösungen. Dies benachteiligt insbesondere Benutzer mit Behinderungen und ältere Benutzer, die oft eine Vielzahl von Anpassungen vornehmen müssen, um ein System ohne Barrieren bedienen zu können, und die sich meist nicht genügend auskennen, um die für sie optimale Konfiguration einzustellen. Die “Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure” (GPII), eine weltweite Open-Source-Initiative, möchte dieses Problem lösen. Dieser Artikel beschreibt den GPII-Ansatz zur Personalisierung von Benutzerschnittstellen, insbesondere die Verwendung von plattformübergreifenden Benutzerprofilen zur Einstellung der Benutzerschnittstelle, und regelbasierte und statistische Ansätze zum Matchmaking. Der GPII-Ansatz wurde in einem ersten Benutzertest vorläufig validiert. Summary Today’s desktop and mobile platforms allow for the user to individually configure presentation and interaction aspects, in order to experience a personal user interface. However, there are hardly any cross-platform solutions available. This is particularly cumbersome for users with disabilities and elderly users who often have to adjust many adaptation aspects for getting barrier-free access, and who mostly do not know their system well enough to be able to configure it in an optimal way. This article describes the GPII approach for personalization of user interfaces, in particular the use of cross-platform user profiles for user interface settings, and rule-based and statistical approaches for matchmaking. The GPII approach has been preliminarily validated in a first user test.

Hearthstone deck-construction with a utility system

Trading Card Games are turn-based games involving strategic planning, synergies and rather complex gameplay. An interesting aspect of this game domain is the strong influence of their metagame: in this particular case deck-construction. Before a game starts, players select which cards from a vast card pool they want to take into the current game session, defining their available options and a great deal of their strategy. We introduce an approach to do automatic deck construction for the digital Trading Card Game Hearthstone, based on a utility system utilizing several metrics to cover gameplay concepts such as cost effectiveness, the mana curve, synergies towards other cards, strategic parameters about a deck as well as data on how popular a card is within the community. The presented approach aims to provide useful information about a deck for a player-level AI playing the actual game session at runtime. Herein, the key use case is to store information on why cards were included and how they should be used in the context of the respective deck. Besides creating new decks from scratch, the algorithm is also capable of filling holes in existing deck skeletons, fitting an interesting use case for Human Hearthstone players: adapting a deck to their specific pool of available cards. After introducing the algorithms and describing the different utility sources used, we evaluate how the algorithm performs in a series of experiments filling holes in existing decks of the Hearthstone eSports scene.