Leandro Agostini do Amaral

Addressing Mobile Usability and Elderly Users: Validating Contextualized Heuristics

Diverse heuristic sets were proposed in order to evolve Heuristic Evaluation for new contexts, as contexts related to the elderly and mobile devices. However, heuristics for evaluation of mobile usability regarding elderly users still need aditional validations. For this reason, our study aimed to enhance the validation of a heuristic set proposed by Al-Razgan et al. for evaluation of mobile usability regarding elderly users. Results showed that the major part of heuristics proposed by Al-Razgan et al. matches with traditional heuristics of Nielsen, while a few remain valuable for evaluations in this context. Also, after validations, we found evidences that the heuristics of Al-Razgan et al. have a great coverage of usability problems of mobile applications used by the elderly, as detected from test with users.

Supporting the developer in an accessible edition of web communications: a study of five desktop tools

Existing guidelines on Web applications development with accessibility are currently not applied by many developers. In this study, the existence and operation of accessibility features in Web authoring tools were verified. In order to do this, five authoring tools were selected to perform an analysis by inspection for several accessibility features. In the same way, a set of criteria involving the search and testing of 14 features which support developers was defined. Inspected features are directly related to the W3C documents ATAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0. As a result, important considerations about the inspection were made and it was determined that the tools already provide some support for accessibility although they are still far from ideal scenario.

Usability and UX practices in small enterprises: lessons from a survey of the Brazilian context

The role of small and medium enterprises (SME), especially small businesses, has significantly increased in the developing of interactive applications. Given the relevance of these companies in the market, the adoption of usability and user experience (UX) practices in these organizations is fundamental for the improvement of interactive systems. This paper performed a survey with 26 Brazilian small businesses of software about their Usability and UX practices. The results showed that Usability Tests and Heuristic Evaluation were the evaluation methods most frequently reported to be used by the surveyed companies. Although the results suggest an improvement in the adoption of usability and UX practices, they also show the need for significant improvement in training and awareness of the importance of usability and UX and appropriating techniques and practices in the context of small businesses. Our results showed a low use of accessibility evaluation methods, such as tests with disabled users (no mention) or even the use of automated tools to check initial aspects of accessibility (mentioned by only 3.85% of respondents) by the companies surveyed. It also showed that the companies surveyed relies many times on professionals of low experience for the conduction of Usability Tests and Heuristic Evaluation.

A4U - an approach to evaluation considering accessibility and usability guidelines

The Web presents an extensive information content available to diverse people, with different abilities and needs. For this reason, the evaluation for the universal accessibility and the usability are difficult tasks, even though having automatic tools to support them. In this context, it is also observed that the relationship between usability attributes and accessibility is too little explicitly considered, consisting of a research issue to be investigated. To support the integrated evaluation of accessibility and usability criteria, it was developed an environment for analyzing results of accessibility and usability assessments, thus allowing human evaluation, and the inclusion of evaluation results generated by semi-automatic tools, leading the evaluator to produce improvements on both fronts. We performed a case study, in which we observed the difficulties of inexperienced developers related to the description of the guidelines documented by the W3C and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The cost for ensuring the objective criteria was the number of criteria to be checked, which tends to be high, leading to excessive time to review the application, but the experience in considering the concepts related to accessibility and usability, in the same environment, was positive.

Game Accessibility Evaluation Methods: A Literature Survey

Identifying a set of methods to be applied specifically for game accessibility evaluation is a relevant issue to boost and enable further research in the field. To fulfill this objective, we defined five research questions and conducted a literature survey based on snowballing technique. To gather the studies in our survey, we defined a start set of works to serve as ground for the review and performed searches using references and citations of these studies. We found a set of accessibility evaluation methods focused on game accessibility and how they can be classified according to ISO standards. We also found that methods focused on mobile game context still need to be better explored because only a few evidences were retrieved regarding such a domain. Besides traditional accessibility aspects as barriers and users’ satisfaction, results show that distinct game aspects are considered during game accessibility evaluations. In addition, the most part of works refers to evaluation of exergames or games related to users’ mobility. Studies also refer to evaluations regarding more than one category of impairment, especially motor and visual impairments. Future researches in the field should focus on inspection-based methods, because traditional user-based methods have been largely referred as applicable to game accessibility context.

Game Development for Researchers: From Concept to User Experience Data Collection

This short-course aims to present the development of games and gamification elements for researchers and students who wish to analyze the experience with users through data collection - an overview of the development, from the fast creation of games to the resources for the collection of data and storage.

Designing for Parental Control: Enriching Usability and Accessibility in the Context of Smart Toys

Designing usable parental control interfaces remains as a challenge in the field. This chapter reviewed traditional Human-Computer Interaction methods, with examples focused on Parental Control interfaces in the context of Smart Toys, aiming practitioners from security and privacy area. We reviewed stages of the User Centered Design (UCD) with greater attention to the evaluation stage. Thus, we detailed activities of evaluation such as: User Testing, Usability Inspection, Accessibility Inspection and Automated Accessibility Testing Tools. Also, we suggested directions for the development of new methods of UCD focused on the context of Smart Toys. Finally, we discussed future trends in the context of Smart Toys: designing for elderly healthcare and interfaces of family control.

AN APPROACH TO TRAINING TEAMS FOR DEVELOPING ACCESSIBLE WEB APPLICATIONS

The interaction with Web applications is becoming increasingly present daily, being useful to provide resources that allow the execution of services, education or entertainment. But many of the resources present barriers in relation to accessibility, hindering disabled users use them efficiently. As solution to this problem, guidelines to develop accessible Web applications have been proposed. However, despite the guidelines definition, the current scenario shows that there are difficulties related to the development considering accessibility requirements. Thus, this paper presents an approach to support effective training in best practices for developing Web accessibility, from the establishment of such guidelines in the environment of the development teams. It was observed that, using the approach, a better support for the training of practical development in relation to the requirements of accessibility, which results in better quality output for Web applications.

Applying an Approach to Develop Web Applications Considering Accessibility Practices Using Design Rationale

Regardless of the techniques and methods that have been developed to improve web applications, there are still gaps that need to be solved in order to reduce the accessibility barriers. Aiming to contribute to this area, this study presents an controlled experiment to validate an approach which uses Design Rationale. The participants attended an initial training and, after being classified according to their experience and divided into different groups, they were asked to develop a web application. Such process gave rise to useful concerns that were shared among the work teams. This paper reports this experiment and presents relevant contributions to approach accessibility issues.