Christophe Ponsard

An Accessible Viewer for Digital Comic Books

In many countries, comic books are very popular and are sometimes are referred to as the ninth art. The most common form of access to comics still remains the paper form. Despite its reading comfort, this media does not fit the use the navigational needs of a number of people with special needs, for example: motor-impaired people, low-sighted people and mobile users. n nIn this paper, we explore how an electronic version of comics can be accessed optimally using a computer based interface. Among the reading modes supported, an automated mode provides a segmentation-based detection of panel boundaries and their display in the right reading order. This enables accessibility with minimal user interaction and maximal image size. Validation was carried out in a number of operational contexts such as a PC controlled through voice, a TV controlled through a remote and a mobile device.

An OCR-Enabled digital comic books viewer

The generalisation of user-friendly and mobile interfaces like smart phones, eBook readers and tablets has accelerated the transition of comic books to the digital format. Although such user interfaces are not always fit for use by people with special needs, the underlying platform offers a large number of innovative services which opens a wide spectrum of new possibilities for enhancing accessibility. n nThis paper explores how these new technologies can improve the digital access to comic books. Our main contribution is the inclusion of optical character recognition within text bubble associated to comics characters. The recognised text can then be fed into a text-to-speech engine for an improved experience. We also details performance improvements of other functionalities such as the panel order detection and special backgrounds. Finally, we discuss how these application specific adaptations can be applied to other contexts and which kind of future deployment can be anticipated.

OLDES: Designing a Low-Cost, Easy-to-Use e-Care System Together with the Stakeholders

With the growing number of senior citizen, Europe is going to face major challenge to deliver care for them. The OLDES project funded by the Information Society Technology Programme of the European Union is exploring how ICT can help in the cost-effective scaling of the care delivery while also improving the well-being of elderly people. Designing a caring system is intrinsically complex because of the personal dimension and the many stakeholders involved across multiple organisations boundaries with different cultures. n nThis paper describes the approach taken in OLDES to produce a design able to cope with the needs of the various stakeholders. Rather than following a traditional requirements to design solution, a co-constructive approach was taken where the multiple actors, including patients, carers, social services, services managers were involved. A distributed animation tool was used to support this approach, enabling validation through various graphical representations of the system behavior. The resulting platform still, under development, will be tested in two major European towns: Bologna and Praha.

Supporting Business Process Exception Management by Dynamically Building Processes Using the BEM Framework

Business process management systems aim at ensuring an efficient chaining of the tasks composing a business process. Their activity relies on process models representing sets of business scenarios. Unfortunately, these models cannot take all the possible states of the environment into account, especially when a process is executed in a dynamic environment. The BEM (Business Event Manager) framework has been designed and developed in order to support dynamic process re-design at run-time in situations where incompatibilities with the predefined model occur. The heart of the solution combines a business process engine, a Complex Event Processing engine and an abductive planner. This paper describes the support offered by the BEM framework and presents a generic description of the architecture together with its implementation.

A Mobile Travel Companion Based on Open Accessibility Data

Nowadays, both the quantity and quality of online information about accessibility are improving thanks to the development of Open Data and the use of crowdsourcing. However citizens with reduced mobility still often have to combine multiple sources of information to prepare their trips and can thus hardly do it on the move. The purpose of this paper is to address this problem by proposing a mobile travel companion. On the backend side, a number of available Open Data about public transportation (bus, train, parking) as well as accessibility of public infrastructures are consolidated both from experts and a crowdsourcing initiative. On the user interface side, it demonstrates how to design an end-to-end view on the accessibility information covering both the travel and the visited infrastructures. The interface organisation is compatible with mobile terminals and makes intelligent use of geolocalisation and proximity information. The whole concept is validated on a complete set of data from a major Belgian city.

Using Blended Learning to Support Community Development - Lessons Learnt from a Platform for Accessibility Experts

Blended learning, mixing both online and face-to-face learning, is now a well established trend in higher n neducation and also increasingly used in companies and public sector. While preserving direct contact with n nthe teacher/trainer, it also provides additional electronic channels to easily share training material and to support n ninteractions among all actors. This paper focuses on specificities of adult training such as their goal orientation, n nthe higher level of practicality and the higher level of collaboration. We also deal with the explicit n ngoal of building communities where learners are progressively sharing their growing experience. Our work is n ndriven by a real-world case study. We report about how generic e-learning tools available on the market can n nbe adapted to address the needs of such a use case and also present some lessons learnt.

Driving the Adoption of Enterprise Architecture Inside Small Companies

Including Enterprise Architecture (EA) as part of an organisationâx80x99s processes is an important milestone in n nreaching higher maturity levels because it will drive the a long term alignment of IT and business dimensions. n nThis paper explores some important questions related to the introduction of EA inside very small enterprises n nor entities (VSE), referring to the very common situation where the IT department has limited resources even n npossibly in a larger organisation. We provide a number of elements of answers on how EA can successfully be n ndeployed in VSE based on a study of approaches already developed by others complemented by our extensive n nexperience in helping such kind of companies to improve their IT practices and adopt EA. The paper is illustrated n non a multi-year case study. It has also a special focus on the ISO29110 standard directed towards VSE n nand possible ways to evolve it to take EA into account in more advanced maturity profiles under preparation.

Unlocking Physical World Accessibility through ICT: A SWOT Analysis

Despite progress in awareness and increasing electronic availability of accessibility information, getting a clear picture of physical accessibility of an infrastructure or journey remains an uncertain task. Over the past few years, a number of emerging technologies have gained maturity and adoption. Some examples are smartphones, open data, social networks, and routing engines. They are also triggering societal shifts about the way people interact together through technology. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how these technologies can positively or negatively impact the evolution of physical accessibility by using a SWOT (Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats) approach.

Towards a service integration portal for deaf people

High speed connections have enabled video-based communication and given deaf and hard-of-hearing people the opportunity to rely on the visual modality to better communicate with each other and with hearing people. However a number of obstacles still have to be removed to make this technology really accessible for all: technical expertise for operating a computer, lack of compatibility, poorly integrated services,... This papers describes an ongoing project for providing a better accessibility by (1) supporting multiple kind of user terminals (such as PC, videophone, TV, mobile phone) in an interoperable way; (2) with a simple and user friendly interface, (3) giving access to a number of related services such as directories, video message box, relay centre and signed news