Maria Gemou

The evolving global public inclusive infrastructure (GPII)

We are facing a perfect storm where, just as access to ICT is becoming mandatory for meaningful participation, independence, and self sustenance, we find that we not only are nowhere near providing access to everyone who needs it, but we are actually losing ground due to reasons such as technical proliferation across platforms, increasing product churn (breaking existing solutions), decreasing social resources to address it, and an inability to effectively serve the tails of these populations because of the higher cost to do so. At the same time the incidence of disabilities is increasing as our population ages. This paper describes the Cloud4all and Prosperity4All projects and progress in building the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure, an infrastructure based on cloud, web and platform technologies that can increase dissemination and international localization while lowering the cost to develop, deploy, market, and support a broad range of access solutions.

From Design for all towards Design for one: a modular user interface approach

The paper describes an approach to specifically tailored user interface design, to adapt the user interface to the specific needs of mobility impaired travellers. Given a user has some interaction impairments or s/he is in a situation that causes an interaction impairment (i.e. noisy environment has the same consequences as hearing impairment), another modality is to be used or adapted to compensate this impairment. As sound has other interaction characteristics than graphical user interface elements (e.g. information can not be presented in parallel, but sequentially), rules for substituting some modalities through others are described.

Towards Open Access Accessibility Everywhere: The ÆGIS Concept

The current paper presents the concept of AEGIS Integrating Project (Grant Agreement: 224348), which aims to embed support for accessibility into every aspect of ICT-including the pre-built user-interface components, developers tools, software applications and the run-time environment, and via embeddable assistive technologies. AEGIS is a 3,5 years project, aiming to constitute a breakthrough in the eInclusion area, through the development of an Open Accessibility Framework, upon which open source accessibility interfaces and applications for the users as well as accessibility toolkits for the developers will be built. Three mainstream markets are targeted, namely the desktop, rich Internet applications and mobile devices/applications market segments.

A UCD Approach towards the Design, Development and Assessment of Accessible Applications in a Large Scale European Integrated Project

AEGIS (Open Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards) is a user-centred project, involving several user groups (users with visual, hearing, motion, speech and cognitive impairments as well as application developers) throughout the design, development and assessment phases. In this paper the holistic UCD (User Centred Design) approach of the project is introduced. This approach ensures that the projects objectives to determine whether 3rd generation access techniques will provide a more accessible, more exploitable and deeply embeddable approach in mainstream ICT applications (desktop, rich Internet and mobile applications) are met, with the full support and involvement of a huge end-user group in every single step of the design, development and deployment of accessible mainstream ICT.

Auto-Personalization: Theory, Practice and Cross-Platform Implementation

In an increasing digital society, access to information and communication technologies (ICT) is no longer just helpful but has become a necessity. However, the human interfaces appearing on these ICT (and increasingly, even common household products) are beyond of the abilities of many people with disability, digital literacy, or aging related limitations. Access to these ICT is essential to these individuals yet it is not possible to create an interface that is usable by all. This paper introduces a new approach to auto-personalization that is based on the development of the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII). The GPII is a new international collaborative effort between users, developers and industry to build a sustainable infrastructure to make access to all digital technologies technically and economically possible, including access by users who are unable to use or understand today’s technologies. Based on a one-size-fits-one approach, the GPII uses auto-adapting mainstream interfaces, and ubiquitous access to assistive technologies when mainstream interfaces cannot adapt enough, to provide each user with the interface they need. The GPII has three main components: a mechanism to allow individuals to easily discover which interface variations they need and then store it in a secure way on a token or in the cloud; a mechanism to allow them to use these stored needs and preferences to automatically adapt the interfaces on the digital technologies they encounter, anywhere and anytime; and a resource for developers (mainstream and assistive technology) providing the information and tools required to develop, disseminate, and support new access solutions more simply, more quickly, and at lower cost.

HMI principles for lateral safe applications

LATERAL SAFE is a subproject of the PREVENT Integrated Project, co-funded by the European Commission under the 6th Framework Programme. LATERAL SAFE introduces a cluster of safety applications of the future vehicles, in order to prevent lateral/rear related accidents and assist the driver in adverse or low visibility conditions and blind spot areas. LATERAL SAFE applications include a lateral and rear monitoring system (LRM), a lane change assistant (LCA) and a lateral collision warning (LCW). An effective Human Machine Interface (HMI) is being developed, addressing each application, on the basis of the results emerged from mock-up tests realised in three sites (one in Greece and two in Sweden), aiming to determine which is the best HMI solution to be provided in each case. In the current paper, the final HMI principles, adopted and demonstrated for each application, are presented.

A Framework for Evaluating the Implementers' Experience in Making Existing Products Accessible: The Prosperity4all Approach

Prosperity4All is a continuous and dynamic paradigm shift towards an e-inclusion framework building on the architectural and technical foundations of other Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure GPII projects aiming to create a self-sustainable and growing ecosystem where developers, implementers, consumers, prosumers and other directly and indirectly actors e.g. teachers, carers, clinicians may play a role in its viability and diversity. An agile and dynamic approach is adopted in three evaluation phases, starting with formative evaluations with five internal implementers leading to more summative techniques towards the final evaluation phase where more ni¾?=i¾?25 and external professionals will use the tools and resources available in the projects repository DeveloperSpace to improve and enhance their own products and services. The evaluation approach for the implementers considers three dimensions: a the projects Key Performance Indicators KPIs, b technical validation activities prior evaluation, and c three evaluation phases followed by a final impact assessment.

Evaluation Framework towards All Inclusive Mainstream ICT

The current paper presents the evaluation framework and plans developed for the evaluation of the applications to be developed in the context of the AEGIS Integrating Project (Grant Agreement: 224348) of the 7th Framework Programme, which aims to embed support for accessibility through the development of an Open Accessibility Framework, upon which open source accessibility interfaces and applications for the users as well as accessibility toolkits for the developers will be built. Within AEGIS, three mainstream markets are targeted, namely the desktop, rich Internet applications and mobile devices/applications market segments. Upon the basis of an overall user-centred approach, the developed evaluation framework will involve all types of targeted end-users, namely persons with disabilities as well as experts in Assistive Technology, trainers/tutors and developers as well as a series of other related stakeholders. Evaluation will be held in three iterative phases and across 4 Pilot sites (Belgium, Spain, Sweden and in the UK), providing in-between each phase, feedback to the development teams for debugging and optimization.

Putting the Legos in Place

Still too many deaths and injuries are a result of road safety problems within Europe. Technologies based on combinations of infrastructural and in-vehicle system are expected to show the most cost-effective solutions. This chapter provides an overview of existing and emerging systems and a first evaluation of their safety effects, as the main “building blocks” in constructing scenarios to enhance traffic safety. Although not aiming at a thorough and exhaustive state of the art on such systems, the presented data allow the user to have a better understanding on the proposed and examined evaluation scenaria in other chapters of this book, as well as provide material for thoughts, to allow the reader (and especially any stakeholder) to imagine his/her own scenaria.

Data Mining and Intelligent Agents for Supporting Mass Customization in the Automotive Industry

Efthimia Mavridou1,3, Dimitrios Tzovaras1, Evangelos Bekiaris2, Pavlos Spanidis2, Maria Gemou2 and George Hassapis3 1Informatics and Telematics Institute, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, 6th km Charilaou – Thermi Rd., P.O. Box: 60361, P.C.: 57001, Thermi, Thessaloniki, 2Hellenic Institute of Transport, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, 6th km Charilaou – Thermi Rd., P.O. Box: 60361, P.C.: 57001, Thermi, Thessaloniki, 3Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, P.C.:54124 , Thessaloniki, Greece