Julio Abascal

Text prediction systems: a survey

Text prediction is one of the most widely used techniques to enhance the communication rate in augmentative and alternative communication. Prediction systems are traditionally used by people with disabilities (e.g. people with motor and speech impairments). However, new applications, such as writing short text messages via mobile phones, have recently appeared. A vast amount of heterogeneous text prediction methods and techniques can be found in literature. Their heterogeneity makes it difficult to understand and compare them, in order to select the most convenient technique for a specific design. This paper presents a survey on text prediction techniques with the intention to provide a systematic view of this field. Prediction applications and related features, such as block size, dictionary structure, prediction method, user interface, etc., are examined. In addition, prediction measurement parameters and published results are compared. A large number of factors that may influence prediction results, including the acceptance of the system by the users, are reviewed, and their influence on the performance and usability of the system is discussed.

Universal accessibility as a multimodal design issue

Creating adaptable solutions to address diverse users and situations.

The use of guidelines to automatically verify Web accessibility

Accessibility is one of the key challenges that the Internet must currently face to guarantee universal inclusion. Accessible Web design requires knowledge and experience from the designer, who can be assisted by the use of broadly accepted guidelines. Nevertheless, guideline application may not be obvious, and many designers may lack experience to use them. The difficulty increases because, as the research on accessibility is progressing, existing sets of guidelines are updated and new sets are proposed by diverse institutions. Therefore, the availability of tools to evaluate accessibility, and eventually repair the detected bugs, is crucial. This paper presents a tool, EvalIris, developed to automatically check the accessibility of Websites using sets of guidelines that, by means of a well-defined XML structure, can be easily replaced or updated.

Inclusive design guidelines for HCI

Part I: Introduction 1. Why Inclusive Design Guidelines? Part II: General Issues in the Design Process 2. Training, Verification and Evaluation of Guidelines 3. Accessibility and Usability Requirements for ITCs for Disabled and Elderly People: A Functional Classification Approach 4. On the Validity of Design Guidelines and the Role of Standardisation 5. Markets and Regulations Part III: Tools for Accessing and Using Guidelines 6. Managing Accessibilty Guidelines During User Interface Design 7. Managing HCI Guidelines with Hypertext on the WWW 8. Bobby: A Validation Tool for Disability Access on the WWW Part 4: Existing Guidelines 9. Nordic Guidlines for Computer Accessibility 10. Guidelines for Web Accessibility 11. Userfit: User Centred Design in Assistive Technology 12. The ISO Approach to the Development of Ergonomics Standards for Accessibility Part 5: Guidelines for Specific Application Areas 13. Guidelines for Telecommunications 14. Public Access Terminals 15. Accessible Systems for Transport 16. Guidelines for the Development of Home Automation Products 17. User Friendly Software for Computer-Based Instruction and Learning Materials Part 6: The Future 18. Telecommunications- Accessibility and Future Directions

Quantitative metrics for measuring web accessibility

This paper raises the need for quantitative accessibility measurement and proposes three different application scenarios where quantitative accessibility metrics are useful: Quality Assurance within Web Engineering, Information Retrieval and accessibility monitoring. We propose a quantitative metric which is automatically calculated from reports of automatic evaluation tools. In order to prove the reliability of the metric, 15 websites (1363 web pages) are measured based on results yielded by 2 evaluation tools: EvalAccess and LIFT. Statistical analysis of results shows that the metric is dependent on the evaluation tool. However, Spearmans test produces high correlation between results of different tools. Therefore, we conclude that the metric is reliable for ranking purposes in Information Retrieval and accessibility monitoring scenarios and can also be partially applied in a Web Engineering scenario.

Universal access to mobile telephony as a way to enhance the autonomy of elderly people

The rise of mobile telephony has opened a vast diversity of new opportunities for older people with different levels of physical restrictions due to ageing. Mobile technology allows not only ubiquitous communications but also anytime access to some services that are vital for elderly peoples security and autonomy. Nevertheless, with the numerous advantages, remote services can also introduce important social and ethical risks for this group of users. This paper tries to analyse the novelties that mobile technology may introduce into the lives of older users, points out some dangers and challenges arising from the use of these technologies and revises some future applications of the present mobile technologies.

Ambient Intelligence in Everyday Life

Human-Centric Computing.- Common Sense Reasoning - From Cyc to Intelligent Assistant.- Face for Ambient Interface.- Empathic Computing.- Location and Activity Recognition Using eWatch: A Wearable Sensor Platform.- Ambient Interfaces.- Co-Creation in Ambient Narratives.- Living with Hyper-reality.- Ambient Pre-Communication.- AmbientBrowser: Web Browser in Everyday Life.- Online Music Search by Tapping.- Whistling to Machines.- Speaker Identification and Speech Recognition Using Phased Arrays.- Architectures in Ambient Intelligence.- A Middleware for the Deployment of Ambient Intelligent Spaces.- Ambient Interfaces for Elderly People at Home.- A Smart Electric Wheelchair Using UPnP.- Collaborative Discovery Through Biological Language Modeling Interface.

Improving deaf users' accessibility in hypertext information retrieval: are graphical interfaces useful for them?

This paper explores the effect of substituting textual links for graphical ones on the performance of deaf signers in hypertext information retrieval (HIR). Both deaf and hearing users found more targets, were faster and became less disoriented in the verbal hypertext interface than in the graphical one. Deaf users were outperformed by hearing users in all conditions except in short paths with the graphical interface. The results and its applied consequences, which would be also relevant to other users with similar problems than those of deaf signers (elderly people, people with dyslexia, people navigating in a website using a foreign language or people with low literacy) are discussed in relation to the CoLiDeS model of web interaction (Kitajima et al. 2000) and to the overgeneralisation of ‘Picture superiority effect’ (Nelson et al. 1976).

Automatically generating tailored accessible user interfaces for ubiquitous services

Ambient Assisted Living environments provide support to people with disabilities and elderly people, usually at home. This concept can be extended to public spaces, where ubiquitous accessible services allow people with disabilities to access intelligent machines such as information kiosks. One of the key issues in achieving full accessibility is the instantaneous generation of an adapted accessible interface suited to the specific user that requests the service. In this paper we present the method used by the EGOKI interface generator to select the most suitable interaction resources and modalities for each user in the automatic creation of the interface. The validation of the interfaces generated for four different types of users is presented and discussed.

Hierarchical Path Search with Partial Materialization of Costs for a Smart Wheelchair

In this paper, the off-line path planner module of a smart wheelchair aided navigation system is described. Environmental information is structured into a hierarchical graph (H-graph) and used either by the user interface or the path planner module. This information structure facilitates efficient path search and easier information access and retrieval. Special path planning issues like planning between floors of a building (vertical path planning) are also viewed. The H-graph proposed is modelled by a tree. The hierarchy of abstractions contained in the tree has several levels of detail. Each abstraction level is a graph whose nodes can represent other graphs in a deeper level of the hierarchy. Path planning is performed using a path skeleton which is built from the deepest abstraction levels of the hierarchy to the most upper levels and completed in the last step of the algorithm. In order not to lose accuracy in the path skeleton generation and speed up the search, a set of optimal subpaths are previously stored in some nodes of the H-graph (path costs are partially materialized). Finally, some experimental results are showed and compared to traditional heuristic search algorithms used in robot path planning.