Ivana Harari

WW3C mobile web best practices evaluation of an educational website

This article presents the experience of a heuristic evaluation on the mobile website of the National University of La Plata, UNLP, based on the recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C, for this type of interface. It also includes a brief reference to the methodology used during the development process, in which prototyping and evaluations had a leading role, taking into account the specific characteristics for being both an educational and a mobile website. The evaluation took place through two mechanisms, a manual or human revision and an automatized validation. This concluded with endless problems and errors discovered through both mechanisms. They are being analyzed and solved in order to achieve the quality of use required in the final version of the mobile website.

Adapting usability heuristics to evaluate Facebook according to elderly

A usability inspection is an evaluation method carried out by one or more experts in HCI, individuals with solid theoretical and practical foundations for the formal and objective observation of a product. One of the most used methods is the heuristic evaluation, a term coined by Jakob Nielsen in 1989 that consists of using a set of usability heuristics to examine a product and analyze its degree of compliance. Due to the ever-growing use of Facebook by older adults, a heuristic evaluation of this application is carried out in this article, where principles of usability have been adapted to fit the profile of an older adult and the interaction with collaborative aspects and groupware functions that are characteristic of social networks. The results of this process of inspection will be of utmost importance to understand whether the current applications consider the older adult as a possible user, respecting principles of usability consistent with their profile.

Teaching programming to kids in situation of social vulnerability

This article relates the experience of a training process on Teaching Programming for vulnerable children and adolescents at social risk, who attend community eaters in neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city of La Plata. In these organizations, in addition to breakfast and lunch, they are offered school attendance in different subjects using the computer as a tool. Since 2007, advanced student and teacher volunteers of the Faculty of Informatics of the National University of La Plata UNLP [1] traveled to social diners in order to introduce computing concepts to children and teenagers with limited economic resources, mainly supporting their activities in the school. They participate in the project called “Inclusive Computing” accepted in several calls for extension projects of the Ministry of Education of Argentina [2]. This project basically aims to strengthen links between the University and the slums through the teaching of Informatics. During the year 2016, 30 children from the Green Hope and Los Robles social institutions were trained in Programming [3]. In this article, we will address the details of the educational process, the methodology used, the pedagogical resources used and the results obtained. Although the lack of resources, the disparity of previous training of the students and the unfavorable context where they live, the results were highly satisfactory, with a high level of participation and interest. It was an enriching and gratified experience, worth being told.

Are Google Office Applications Easy for Seniors?: Usability Studies with 120 Elderly Users

The Computer Science School of the UNLP, constantly works with the area of education, bringing ICTs to sectors that are excluded from the information society. Since 2010, it began working with the senior citizen sector. In 2015 they took the GDocs and GDrive course with the possibility to participate in a usability research. The students, about 120 seniors between 68 and 90 years of age, belonged to PAMI, the National Institute for Retirees and Pensioners of Argentina. The main objective of this poster is to share this experience for which usability studies were developed in order to find out if Google collaborative office apps are easy to learn and use by seniors. These form a broader research work, of great value to the discipline of HCI, where the focus of study is a community of people that are not usually considered as potential users of the products that are being developed today.

SiMor: An intensive web accessibility analyzer based on rules

In the last few years there has been a significant amount of social awareness regarding the integration of persons with disabilities and access to information, especially as of 2010, with the new Act 26653 mandating the development of accessible content in public service and official web sites in Argentina. For this reason there is an increasing need for facilitating and guaranteeing the development of an inclusive web that allow anyone to gain access to their contents and services independently from their sensory and/or cognitive capabilities or the means they use for this end. This paper presents the development of an intensive web accessibility analyzer called SiMor, that aimed at gathering the most important features of existing web accessibility validators and including innovative features with the goal of optimizing the assessment process while assisting web developers in achieving accessibility. Through SiMor we aim at contributing to a more inclusive and equalitarian society with a tool that is, in itself, accessible, extensible, open source and unrestricted in its use by the community of developers.

Experiencias en el dictado de cursos sobre accesibilidad web en modalidad virtual

Este articulo relata la experiencia educativa sobre un proceso de ensenanza continuo y sostenido sobre Accesibilidad Web, mediante la realizacion de cursos a distancia abiertos a toda la comunidad. Estos cursos en sus diferentes versiones se vienen organizando desde la Facultad de Informatica de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP) desde el ano 2011. Se explicaran detalles, objetivos, aspectos metodologicos, resultados de esta experiencia de formacion, que ha involucrado a mas de 300 alumnos provenientes de distintos puntos de la Argentina como del mundo.