Monique Noirhomme-Fraiture

A Framework and a Language for Usability Automatic Evaluation of Web Sites by Static Analysis of HTML Source Code

Usability guidelines are supposed to help web designers to design usable sites. Unfortunately, studies carried out that applying these guidelines by designers is difficult, essentially because of the way of structuring or formulating them. One possible way to help designers in their task is to provide them with tools that evaluate the designed site (during or after design) and alerts them about usability errors. Ideally, these tools would support an appropriate guidelines definition language that enables structuring any guideline in an evaluationoriented form. In this paper we propose a framework and guideline definition language for usability (automatic) evaluation.

Automated evaluation of web usability and accessibility by guideline review

A novel approach is presented for automatically evaluating of the usability and accessibility (U&A) of web sites by performing a static analysis of their HTML code against U&A guidelines. The approach relies on separating guidelines evaluation logic from the evaluation engine. Due to this separation, the whole evaluation process can be divided into two main phases: specifying formal guidelines and web page evaluation. In the first phase, the formal structure of a guideline is expressed in terms of Guideline Definition Language (GDL). In the second phase, the web page is parsed to identify its contents and structure and link them to relevant guidelines to be evaluated on the page parsed. This approach enables the simultaneous evaluation of multiple guidelines selected on demand from different sources. It also optimises evaluation by automatically identifying common sub-structures among structured guidelines. It also supports the expression, by evaluators with different usability practises, of alternative evaluation strategies.

Automatic cross-referencing of HCI guidelines by statistical methods

Abstract This paper deals with the problem of automatically generating cross-reference links when converting existing HCI guidelines to hypertext. A statistical approach is introduced, based on techniques commonly used in Information Retrieval. Complementary probabilistic methods are also considered, so as to benefit from existing information about interesting links (manual cross-references) in order to create more relevant links than the ones generated without any knowledge. A semi-automated method is outlined to generate cross-references, with an application to a design guide containing guidelines.

Screen usability guidelines for persons with disabilities

This paper presents lessons learned from implementing interactive applications for adults persons with moderate mental disabilities. Guidelines for improving screen usability have been drawned from the experience gained in implementing and using such softwares.

ERGOLAB: a screen usability evaluation tool for children with cerebral palsy

This paper presents experimental tests to conduct with a screen usability evaluation tool named ERGOLABin order to throw a bridge between the world of the user interface usability and the world of children with cerebral palsy (CWCP): calibrating the interactive media sensibility, adapting the screen space navigation, managing the hidden information. These usability tests range from elementary level to semantically complex one,

Automated Repair Tool for Usability and Accessibility of Web Sites

The need for checking both usability and accessibility of Web sites is widely recognized, approved and recommended by several official organizations. What should really be more recognized or addressed is an equal need for repairing the usability and accessibility defects that have been detected. Within the Destine suite, we developed a tool allowing to repair the HTML source code of a page with user interaction. Thanks to an improved version of the Guideline Definition Language (GDL), the accessibility guidelines are not hard-coded, so that our tool can deal with any existing or future standards

Complexity and Cognitive Computing

This paper proposes a hybrid expert system to minimize some of the complexity problems present in the artificial intelligence field such as the so-called bottleneck of expert systems, e.g., the knowledge elicitation process; the model choice for the knowledge representation to code human reasoning; the number of neurons in the hidden layer and the topology used in the connectionist approach, ; the difficulty to obtain the explanation on how the network arrived to a conclusion. To overcome these difficulties the cognitive computing was integrated to the developed system.

A neuro-fuzzy-GA system architecture for helping the knowledge acquisition process

The knowledge acquisition process consists on extracting knowledge of a domain expert. This work aims to minimize the intrinsic difficulties of the knowledge acquisition process. For achieve this purpose, all possible rules from the domain expert and a set of example were obtained for a short time interval. The proposed hybrid expert system minimizes the knowledge acquisition difficulties using a new methodology. To build this hybrid architecture, several tools were used: symbolic paradigm, connectionist paradigm, fuzzy logic and genetic algorithm.

Guidelines for Choosing Interaction Objects

Every designer faces the problem of choosing appropriate interaction objects when designing a human-computer interface. This should depend on the user capabilities, the data model and the target environment. Because the designer must rely on the experience and because there exists no way to assess that presentation consistency of the user-interfacefe is preserved, research results are presented as explicit selection rules.

Qualitative Simulation in Physiology with Bond Graphs

Abstract The simulation of a physiological system involves the construction of a model. generally in the form of mathematical equations. the manipulation of this model to obtain the solution of the equations, and finally the interpretation of the result. In a qualitative simulation, in a certain sense, we go directly from the real system to the interpretation without use of the mathematical model. This approach was introduced using artificial intelligence techniques, where we try to reproduce a human reasoning explaining the behavior of the physical system. The qualitative model is constituted by facts and functioning rules. However it is not easy to chose the cause and effect of a functioning rule well suited in each case. The main goal of the work is to present a methodology, based on bond graphs, and the causal stroke algorithm (CASA for short), to obtain the antecedent and consequent of rules, model that explains the functioning of a physiological system. To illustrate the methodology, it is discussed a qualitative dynamic compliance model of a ventricle.