Peter Heumader

Accessibility of Brainstorming Sessions for Blind People

Today, research focuses on the accessibility of explicit information for blind users. This gives only partly access to the information flow in brain-storming sessions, since non-verbal communication is not supported. Advances in ICT however allow capturing implicit information like hand gestures as important part of non-verbal communication. Thus, we describe a system that al-lows integrating blind people into a brainstorming session using a mind map.

A User Modelling Wizard for People with Motor Impairments

Since a couple of years tablets are gaining ever increasing markets share, so that desktop PCs are slowly losing their dominant role. People with disabilities are also attracted by tablets but they are sometimes challenged by the multi-touch technology itself and the natural interfaces of the provided applications. This paper presents an approach, where a novel user modelling wizard for people with motor impairments is used to gain a deeper understanding of very specific interaction patterns leading to a user model, which allows us to automatically derive an application- and user-specific configuration. An evaluation showed promising results because the configuration resulting from the user model is comparable to the configuration proposed by consultants. The result can either be used by the consultants to configure applications accordingly, or by the application itself, to provide an adaptive user interface suited to the individual capabilities.

MathInBraille online converter

MathInBraille offers an online portal for converting mathematical formulae and e-Documents with mathematical content into Braille and spoken formats. MathInBraille provides an open conversion service, which can be used for free by anybody what should help to increase access, use and availability of math content for blind people.

A Mobile Guidance Platform for Public Transportation

This paper presents an approach which allows people with disabilities to use public transportation more effectively in supporting them throughout the whole journey. Besides the common feature set, like offering time table information and planning trips consisting of multiple rides it additionally includes information when to get on or off a vehicle and performs route re-planning in the case of unexpected events like delays. Moreover, it provides information particularly important for people with disabilities, like wheelchair users or blind persons. Depending on the user profile, information regarding the accessibility of vehicles and also routing information for footpaths are delivered in real-time, which is especially important at major transfer points like railway stations where routes tailored to the user’s capabilities are provided. As it cannot be guaranteed that every footpath and every obstacle is charted and up-to-date, users can improve routing information on their own in a crowd sourcing based approach.

Virtual Braille-Keyboard in Co-located Meetings

Our daily live is no longer imaginable without touch devices. Besides standard touch devices as mobile phones and tablets also touch-tables have the chance to find their way into our daily lives. Co-located meetings can be seen as a good application area for touch-tables. They can present the artifact information layer to the whole group. On touch surfaces virtual keyboards are used by sighted people for text input and text manipulations. For blind people, such keyboards are only accessible with a decreased working speed. In co-located meetings, manipulation of artifacts (for instance bubbles of mind-maps) is very dynamic. Therefore, a decreased working speed to generate and manipulate textual inputs makes an equal participation of blind people in co-located meetings impossible. The ongoing work is concerned with the development of a virtual Braille-keyboard to allow a better integration of blind users into co-located meetings.

Accessible eLearning - eLearning for Accessibility/AT

The special thematic session on eLearning for accessibility and assistive technologies is made up of a wide range of papers that illustrate a variety of approaches to teaching and learning that comes under the title ‘eLearning’ such as gamification, use of apps, online presentation tools and MOOCS. Successful inclusion of those with disabilities as well as those who wish to enhance their knowledge can be achieved by ensuring ease of access to the platform of choice, the type of content available, whilst enhancing user motivation and appreciation.

Requirements Engineering for People with Cognitive Disabilities – Exploring New Ways for Peer-Researchers and Developers to Cooperate

Digital technologies can improve the daily lives of people with cognitive disabilities, allowing them to participate and communicate in society. However the success of a technical product depends not only on the price or lifespan, but also on its user experience. To ensure user satisfaction when creating new technology or products, it is necessary to know their needs. This article presents methods of requirements analysis and elicitation for digital participation together with people with cognitive impairments.

Easy Reader – or the Importance of Being Understood

With current advancements in technologies like natural language processing engines and image recognition software the development of a tool that would automatically translate content, that is too difficult to understand for the individual person with cognitive disabilities, into an easier to understand, alternative format seems possible. In this paper we want to describe the idea to create a flexible extensible framework that would help people with cognitive disabilities to better understands and navigate web-content.

Automated Configuration of Applications for People with Specific Needs

This paper presents an approach to store user settings and abilities in a user profile that can be used to automatically adjust the settings of applications on mobile or desktop devices for people with special needs. The user profile and the settings are determined automatically with a wizard like application or manually with a carer and are dispatched to other devices with the use of cloud services. By this users with special needs will be able to operate new applications without the need of a carer setting up the application for them.