Azelin Mohamed Noor

An exploratory study on interns' communicative abilities: The industrial internship experience

Communication skills, other than specialized technology competency is a competency valued by employers. Universities are accountable in providing adequate communication skills for graduates to prepare them to face the challenging and changing industry. This study investigates the communication skills (oral and written) of interns from a private engineering and technology focused university in Malaysia. For a more comprehensive perspective, two sets of questionnaires are used to gather data from the interns and their respective industrial supervisors. Overall, the findings indicate that the interns possess high communicative abilities both in oral and written. Although the mean scores suggest that the interns had rated their communicative abilities higher than their industrial supervisors, t-test results show no significant difference between the two groups of respondents. Interestingly, no significant difference is found between interns from different academic programmes. The findings of this study indicate that the university may have prepared and groomed its students adequately to meet the needs of the current industries. Explanations for the findings are discussed in relation to the universitys intake requirements, course syllabus, and university-industry collaborative initiatives.

A Preliminary Study on the Effect of Audio Feedback to Support Comprehension of Web Content Among Non-visual Internet Users

Unlike normal users, the visually impaired need to rely on added technology that enables them to browse the Internet. Screen readers have been used to achieve this purpose in aiding this group of users. It is a software that has a programmed narrator which reads out aloud each item that appears on the computer screen. This paper aims to provide the visually impaired computer users an Internet search experience similar to normal users. We argue that accessibility of information from web content should be made equal to all users. An interview and a pilot testing were conducted for data collection from a group of visually impaired computer users. The study suggests that audio feedback could support comprehension of web content effectively and becomes more efficient with respect to several criteria that need to be considered in the development of a screen reader for the visually impaired computer user.

Accessibility matters: The need of Bahasa Melayu (BM) screen reader for the visually impaired internet users

Internet usage is rising at a frenzied rate as knowledge and information sharing becomes easy and time-saving. Regrettably, the visually impaired do not enjoy this liberty and they have difficulties in using the computer and the Internet to obtain any shared and published information. This difficulty is also faced by the visually impaired Bahasa Melayu (BM) language medium Internet users. Existing screen readers are unable to fully cater for users who need to browse webpages written in BM language. The inability of screen reader narration to enunciate BM words acceptably has limited the accessibility for the visually impaired to acquire any information in the BM language. Narration of the texts are done by non-BM speakers and the enunciation of those words confuses and often, do not help users. Thus, this paper addresses this shortcoming by investigating the difficulties faced by visually impaired Internet users to understand spoken texts when using screen readers with a non-BM language narrator or speaker. This study aims to reduce the time taken for the visually impaired to understand information written in the BM language and narrated by a screen reader. This paper highlights the processes involved in developing a prototype screen reader, which will read in the BM language and in a Malaysian accent. To achieve all the objectives, preliminary interviews and testing sessions were conducted to collect data to test the hypotheses made. The findings were then used as the main source of data to develop a prototype screen reader. From the built prototype, user-test was conducted with a sample group consisting of the visually impaired to test the functionalities and evaluate the effectiveness of the software. Results and recommendations are shared at the end of the paper as milestones for future enhancements.