Masatomo Kobayashi

Elderly user evaluation of mobile touchscreen interactions

Smartphones with touchscreen-based interfaces are increasingly used by non-technical groups including the elderly. However, application developers have little understanding of how senior users interact with their products and of how to design senior-friendly interfaces. As an initial study to assess standard mobile touchscreen interfaces for the elderly, we conducted performance measurements and observational evaluations of 20 elderly participants. The tasks included performing basic gestures such as taps, drags, and pinching motions and using basic interactive components such as software keyboards and photo viewers. We found that mobile touchscreens were generally easy for the elderly to use and a weeks experience generally improved their proficiency. However, careful observations identified several typical problems that should be addressed in future interfaces. We discuss the implications of our experiments, seeking to provide informal guidelines for application developers to design better interfaces for elderly people.

Social accessibility: achieving accessibility through collaborative metadata authoring

Web content is under the control of site owners, and therefore the site owners have the responsibility to make their content accessible. This is a basic assumption of Web accessibility. Users who want access to inaccessible content must ask the site owners for help. However, the process is slow and too often the need is mooted before the content becomes accessible. Social Accessibility is an approach to drastically reduce the burden on site owners and to shorten the time to provide accessible Web content by allowing volunteers worldwide to - renovate any webpage on the Internet. Users encountering Web access problems anywhere at any time will be able to immediately report the problems to a social computing service. Volunteers can be quickly notified, and they can easily respond by creating and publishing the requested accessibility metadata--also helping any other users who encounter the same problems. Site owners can learn about the methods for future accessibility renovations based on the volunteers external metadata. There are two key technologies to enable this process, the external metadata that allows volunteers to annotate existing Web content, and the social computing service that supports the collaborative renovations. In this paper, we will first review previous approaches, and then propose the Social Accessibility approach. The scenario, implementation, and results of a pilot service are introduced, followed by discussion of future directions.

Collaborative web accessibility improvement: challenges and possibilities

Collaborative accessibility improvement has great potential to make the Web more adaptive in a timely manner by inviting users into the improvement process. The Social Accessibility Project is an experimental service for a new needs-driven improvement model based on collaborative metadata authoring technologies. In 10 months, about 18,000 pieces of metadata were created for 2,930 webpages through collaboration. We encountered many challenges as we sought to create a new mainstream approach. The productivity of the volunteer activities exceeded our expectation, but we found large and important problems in the screen reader users lack of awareness of their own accessibility problems. In this paper, we first introduce examples, analyze some statistics from the pilot service and then discuss our findings and challenges. Three future directions including site-wide authoring are considered.

Motivating Multi-Generational Crowd Workers in Social-Purpose Work

Crowdsourcing for social goals (e.g., supporting public libraries or people with disabilities) is a promising area. However, little is known about how to develop active worker communities for such goals. First, we need reliable metrics for the workers motivation. Second, the characteristics of senior crowd workers have rarely been studied, even though they often play a primary role in social-purpose work. This work introduces a four-quadrant worker motivation model for social-purpose crowdsourcing and describes a system based on that model. Then we investigate the outcomes from the systems operations for six months, which involved both young and senior workers, seeking better ways to build an active community of crowd workers. We analyzed the workers activities based on the system logs, conducted a survey, assessed the correlations between the subjective values and actual behaviors, and then discuss the implications.

Age-Based task specialization for crowdsourced proofreading

Crowdsourcing can efficiently produce accessible digital books for people with print disabilities. However, particularly in Japan, the proofreading step tends to be expensive because of language-related issues. The elderly population is a promising source of proofreaders. Our surveys found that they have strong linguistic skills and want to contribute to society. So why do they rarely participate in Internet-based work scenarios such as crowdsourcing? We introduce a collaborative crowdsourcing model that aims to fully utilize the linguistic skills of the elderly by encouraging younger people to support the elderly in overcoming their limited technical skills. We decompose each proofreading task into several types of sub-tasks, where some tasks require more linguistic skills while the other tasks need more technical skills, so that the linguistic and technical tasks can be distributed to older and younger participants, respectively. We also discuss other scenarios that may be suitable for such multi-generational crowdsourcing model.

Exploratory Analysis of Collaborative Web Accessibility Improvement

The Web is becoming a platform for daily activities and is expanding the opportunities for collaboration among people all over the world. The effects of these innovations are seen not only in major Web services such as wikis and social networking services but also in accessibility services. Collaborative accessibility improvement has great potential to make the Web more adaptive. Screen reader users, developers, site owners, and any Web volunteers who want to help the users are invited into the activities to improve accessibility in a timely manner. The Social Accessibility Project is an experimental service for a new needs-driven improvement model based on collaborative metadata authoring technologies. In 20 months, about 19,000 pieces of metadata were created for more than 3,000 Web pages through collaboration based on 355 requests submitted from users. We encountered many challenges as we sought to create a new mainstream approach and created distinctive features in new user interfaces to address some of these challenges. Although the new features increased user participation, serious issues remain. The productivity of the volunteers exceeded our expectations, but we found large and important problems in the users’ lack of awareness of their own accessibility problems. This is a critical problem for sustaining the active use of the service, because about 70% of the improvement starts with a request from a user. Helping users with visual impairments understand the actual issues is a crucial and challenging topic, and will lead to improved accessibility. We first introduce examples of collaboration, analyze several kinds of statistics on the activities of the users and volunteers of the pilot service, and then discuss our findings and challenges. Five future foci are considered: site-wide metadata authoring, encouraging active participation by users, quality management for the created metadata, metadata for dynamic HTML applications, and collaborations with site owners.

Involving Senior Workers in Crowdsourced Proofreading

Seniors have a wealth of knowledge and free time, so they are a promising workforce for crowdsourced tasks. Currently senior workers are hardly involved in real applications. We have started an experimental project that crowdsources proofreading micro-tasks to volunteer workers to efficiently produce accessible digital books. By design, the majority of the workers in this project are senior citizens. In this paper, we report the findings of our experiment in which we tested four working hypotheses about the behavioral characteristics of senior workers. We also discuss skill management to improve task performance and motivation encouragement for long-term involvement of senior workers.

Question first: Passive interaction model for gathering experience and knowledge from the elderly

We propose the Question First interaction model, which aims to reduce the barriers to accessing online mobile information transmission for the elderly and aggregate their useful experience and knowledge for younger generations. Question First helps elderly users to transfer their knowledge or experiences by simply answering questions through conventional mobile terminals. The proposed interaction model is based on extending conventional interaction modes of phone calls and em ails, helping elderly users become fam iliar with social networking, without the requirement of learning to use social networking service interfaces. Ultimately, we aim to expand the social participation of the elderly in both online communication and online work such as crowdsourcing. We report the results of a two-week user study on the crowdsourcing of participants experience and knowledge through online communication, and analyze the information obtained to evaluate the efficiency of this interaction model by extracting features of each participants knowledge and experience via the proposed method.

Sasayaki: augmented voice web browsing experience

Auditory user interfaces have great Web-access potential for billions of people with visual impairments, with limited literacy, who are driving, or who are otherwise unable to use a visual interface. However a sequential speech-based representation can only convey a limited amount of information. In addition, typical auditory user interfaces lose the visual cues such as text styles and page structures, and lack effective feedback about the current focus. To address these limitations, we created Sasayaki (from whisper in Japanese), which augments the primary voice output with a secondary whisper of contextually relevant information, automatically or in response to user requests. It also offers new ways to jump to semantically meaningful locations. A prototype was implemented as a plug-in for an auditory Web browser. Our experimental results show that the Sasayaki can reduce the task completion times for finding elements in webpages and increase satisfaction and confidence.

Question-Answer Cards for an Inclusive Micro-tasking Framework for the Elderly

Micro-tasking (e.g., crowdsourcing) has the potential to help “long-tail” senior workers utilize their knowledge and experience to contribute to their communities. However, their limited ICT skills and their concerns about new technologies can prevent them from participating in emerging work scenarios. We have devised a question-answer card interface to allow the elderly to participate in micro-tasks with minimal ICT skills and learning efforts. Our survey identified a need for skill-based task recommendations, so we also added a probabilistic skill assessment model based on the results of the micro-tasks. We also discuss some scenarios to exploit the question-answer card framework to create new work opportunities for senior citizens. Our experiments showed that untrained seniors performed the micro-tasks effectively with our interface in both controlled and realistic conditions, and the differences in their skills were reliably assessed.