Mark R. Laff

Socially translucent systems: social proxies, persistent conversation, and the design of “babble”

We take as our premise that it is possible and desirable todesign systems that support social processes. We describe Loops, aproject which takes this approach to supporting computer-mediatedcommunication (CMC) through structural and intemctive propertiessuch as persistence and a minimalist graphical representation ofusers and their activities that we call a social proxy. We discussa prototype called Babble that has been used by our group for overa year, and has been deployed to six other groups at the Watsonlabs for about two months. We describe usage experiences, lessonslearned, and next steps.

Social translucence: designing social infrastructures that make collective activity visible

Making social cues visible and persistent helps online groups govern their activities.

PowerUp: an accessible virtual world

PowerUp is a multi-player virtual world educational game with a broad set of accessibility features built in. This paper considers what features are necessary to make virtual worlds usable by individuals with a range of perceptual, physical, and cognitive disabilities. The accessibility features were included in the PowerUp game and validated, to date, with blind and partially sighted users. These features include in-world navigation and orientation tools, font customization, self-voicing text-to-speech output, and keyboard-only and mouse-only navigation. We discuss user requirements gathering, the validation study, and further work needed.

Cognitive and learning difficulties and how they affect access to IT systems

In October 2005, the IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center and T.J. Watson Research Center hosted a symposium on “cognitive and learning difficulties and how they affect access to IT systems”. The central premise of the symposium was the recognition that cognitive and learning difficulties have a profound impact on a person’s ability to interact with information technology (IT) systems, but that little support is currently being offered by those systems. By bringing together internationally renowned experts from a variety of different, but complementary, research fields, the symposium aimed to provide a complete overview of the issues related to this topic. This paper summarises the discussions and findings of the symposium.

Exploring Visual and Motor Accessibility in Navigating a Virtual World

For many millions of users, 3D virtual worlds provide an engaging, immersive experience heightened by a synergistic combination of visual realism with dynamic control of the user’s movement within the virtual world. For individuals with visual or dexterity impairments, however, one or both of those synergistic elements are impacted, reducing the usability and therefore the utility of the 3D virtual world. This article considers what features are necessary to make virtual worlds usable by such individuals. Empirical work has been based on a multiplayer 3D virtual world game called PowerUp, to which we have built in an extensive set of accessibility features. These features include in-world navigation and orientation tools, font customization, self-voicing text-to-speech output, key remapping options, and keyboard-only and mouse-only navigation. Through empirical work with legally blind teenagers and adults with cerebral palsy, these features have been refined and validated. Whereas accessibility support for users with visual impairment often revolves around keyboard navigation, these studies emphasized the need to support visual aspects of pointing device actions too. Other notable findings include use of speech to supplement sound effects for novice users, and, for those with cerebral palsy, a general preference to use a pointing device to look around the world, rather than keys or on-screen buttons. The PowerUp accessibility features provide a core level of accessibility for the user groups studied.

The computer sciences electronic magazine: translating from paper to multimedia

In this paper, we discuss issues in design and usability of the IBM Computer Sciences Electronic Magazine (CSEM). The CSEM is an interactive multimedia translation of a paper magazine. It contains articles describing Computer Sciences projects at the four IBM Research Labs. Combining aspects from print, television, and computers, it is a useful vehicle for studying what we see as a completely new communication medium. We report both our design rationale in creating the magazine and the results of several user studies which helped us understand our successes and failures. These studies are a part of an iterative process through which we have redesigned and improved the CSEM.

The EFX editing and effects environment

The EFX digital editing and effects environment integrates facilities for nonlinear editing of digitized film, video, and audio with sophisticated image-manipulating special effects. EFX offers an intuitive, visual, direct-manipulation user interface for building multimedia compositions. This front end, discussed in the paper, is coupled with a powerful parallel-processing computer that computes the special effects and plays back the uncompressed digitized film or video in real time.

Accessibility in virtual worlds

Virtual worlds present both an opportunity and a challenge to people with disabilities. Standard ways to make such worlds accessible to a broad set of users have yet to emerge, although some core requirements are already clear. This paper describes work in progress towards an accessible 3D multi-player game that includes a set of novel tools for orienting, searching and navigating the world.

SW 2 - An object-based programming environment

Programming systems traditionally deal with only a few different types of data objects. Operating-system command languages, for example, are concerned with files and programs. Typical programming languages deal with computer-related objects such as integers, strings, arrays, and records. This is in sharp contrast to the variety of real-world objects that people reason about. Smallworld is a programming environment in which the real world is represented by objects that have properties . A property represents a fact about the corresponding real-world entity. Thus Smallworld actions (programs), which operate on objects specified in this simple but general way, are “smart”: they consider all of the relevant facts concerning (that is, all of the properties of) the objects they manipulate. Smallworld was strongly influenced by the design of Smalltalk, especially in the organization of objects into classes and superclasses. The two languages differ (1) in their treatment of the difference between classes and objects that are not classes and (2) in their definition of methods that act on classes. Smallworld minimizes the differences between classes and non-class objects, resulting in a simpler and more consistent system. Where Smalltalk is a programming language using a pure object-oriented paradigm and dependent on a powerful graphical interface, Smallworld is a shell language that runs on conventional terminals and allows multiple program paradigms where appropriate.

NetVista: growing an Internet solution for schools

NetVista is an integrated suite of clients and servers supporting Internet access for students and teachers in kindergarten through 12th-grade schools. Developed by a small team of IBM researchers, Net Vista is a prime example of using an object-oriented framework to support user-centered design and to accommodate Internet-paced changes in network infrastructure, functionality, and user expectations. In this paper, we describe salient aspects of NetVistas design and development and its evolution from research project to product. In particular, we discuss the factors supporting a sustained focus on end users over the life of the project, the object-oriented framework underlying Netvista, and the role of this framework in accommodating both evolutionary and radical changes to the design of the user interface and the underlying technical infrastructure.