Ángel Lucas González

Combining expert knowledge and data mining in a medical diagnosis domain

Abstract The medical diagnosis system described here uses underlying knowledge in the isokinetic domain, obtained by combining the expertise of a physician specialised in isokinetic techniques and data mining techniques applied to a set of existing data. An isokinetic machine is basically a physical support on which patients exercise one of their joints, in this case the knee, according to different ranges of movement and at a constant speed. The data on muscle strength supplied by the machine are processed by an expert system that has built-in knowledge elicited from an expert in isokinetics. It cleans and pre-processes the data and conducts an intelligent analysis of the parameters and morphology of the isokinetic curves. Data mining methods based on the discovery of sequential patterns in time series and the fast Fourier transform, which identifies similarities and differences among exercises, were applied to the processed information to characterise injuries and discover reference patterns specific to populations. The results obtained were applied in two environments: one for the blind and another for elite athletes.

On the testability of WCAG 2.0 for beginners

Web accessibility for people with disabilities is a highly visible area of research in the field of ICT accessibility, including many policy activities across many countries. The commonly accepted guidelines for web accessibility (WCAG 1.0) were published in 1999 and have been extensively used by designers, evaluators and legislators. W3C-WAI published a new version of these guidelines (WCAG 2.0) in December 2008. One of the main goals of WCAG 2.0 was testability, that is, WCAG 2.0 should be either machine testable or reliably human testable. In this paper we present an educational experiment performed during an intensive web accessibility course. The goal of the experiment was to assess the testability of the 25 level-A success criteria of WCAG 2.0 by beginners. To do this, the students had to manually evaluate the accessibility of the same web page. The result was that only eight success criteria could be considered to be reliably human testable when evaluators were beginners. We also compare our experiment with a similar study published recently. Our work is not a conclusive experiment, but it does suggest some parts of WCAG 2.0 to which special attention should be paid when training accessibility evaluators.

Applying new interaction paradigms to the education of children with special educational needs

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.

SBT: a translator from spanish mathematical braille to MathML

One of the key issues for integrating blind people into everyday life is education. For many educational subjects, however, there is no suitable assistive technology for blind people. One especially sensitive question facing blind people is learning mathematical language, apart from interacting with sighted teachers and students. This article presents a Spanish mathematical Braille to mathematical notation (MathML) conversion system to fill this gap. The translation system has been designed as a portable programming library, it solves ambiguities in Spanish mathematical Braille and it generates an intermediate code, which means that it can be easily adapted to other Braille languages or to other output formats

User-Interface Modelling for Blind Users

The design of a user interface usable by blind people sets specific usability requirements that are unnecessary for sighted users. These requirements focus on task adequacy, dimensional trade-off, behaviour equivalence, semantic loss avoidance and device-independency. Consequently, the development of human-computer interfaces (HCI) that are based on task, domain, dialog, presentation, platform and user models has to be modified to take into account these requirements. This paper presents a user interface model for blind people, which incorporates these usability requirements into the above HCI models. A frame-work implementing the model has been developed and implemented in an electronic speaking bilingual software environment for blind or visually impaired people and in an educational system for children with special educational needs.

Comparative analysis of the accessibility of desktop operating systems

This paper presents the results of ongoing research on methods for evaluating the accessibility conformance level of software and especially operating systems. Our approach is based on recommendations from software accessibility standards, and defines techniques for evaluating each of those recommendations. The proposed method has been applied to evaluate the accessibility features of one closed-source and one open-source desktop operating system, Microsoft Windows XP and the Ubuntu Linux distribution, respectively. Specifically, the functionality we have evaluated was task management and file system management. From the point of view of the evaluation process, we conclude that more work is needed on the development of support tools and techniques. And from the point of view of the specific comparison, we conclude that, taking into account the analysed functionality, the current version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution is slightly more accessible than the current Windows release, though neither of the systems fully conform to the accessibility standards.

Including accessibility in higher education curricula for ICT

This paper describes the successful experience carried out by professors of the CETTICO research group of the Technical University of Madrid to incorporate accessibility in the curricula of higher education in ICT in Spain. The paper covers the legal requirements to include accessibility in curricula in Spain, the courses and modules that we have been teaching through the years and the teaching techniques and tools that we have been using.

Applying a Methodology for Educating Students with Special Needs: A Case Study

The introduction of innovative educational technologies opens up new ways of interacting with students. We propose to exploit this potential to help in the education of children with special needs. We analyze the state of the art of tools supporting the teaching process, focusing on the omissions of existing research. We propose a new framework to help throughout the whole teaching process and describe its application to Proyecto Aprender (Learn Project), an educational resource targeting children with learning difficulties. Finally, we outline some conclusions and current/future research lines.

Building Accessible Flash Applications: An XML-Based Toolkit

The use of Flash as a web-based multimedia development tool has spread lately. Although a big effort has gone into improving its accessibility, there are still accessibility gaps requiring programming or purchase from another supplier. This makes building an accessible Flash application an ad hoc, complex and time-consuming task. With the aim of lightening the accessibility-related workload, we have implemented a toolkit that helps to create accessible multimedia Flash resources. This toolkit specifies the accessibility features as XML configuration files. It includes a library that works like a wrapper abstracting the logic layer of the different events and iterations from the physical layer. This way, new functionalities can easily be added. Additionally, it has been successfully used to build teaching and teaching support systems.

Adapting computer-human interaction in real time

There are various types of application-user interactions with different needs. It is almost impossible to define a communication process that covers all communication needs. The solution would be to redefine the dialog process (in run time) to adapt to people with specific characteristics, allowing a user to manage the application easily. We are proposing an independent module that could generate the process of interaction in real time and the communication process from an interpreted script.