| Editors' Introduction | | BIB | Full-Text | 1 | |
| Daniel Cunliffe; Douglas Tudhope | |||
| Mobile digital interactive storytelling -- a winding path | | BIB | Full-Text | 3-9 | |
| Frank Nack; Annika Waern | |||
| Storytelling on mobile devices for cultural heritage | | BIBA | Full-Text | 11-35 | |
| Vincenzo Lombardo; Rossana Damiano | |||
| This paper illustrates a storytelling-based application for an anthropomorphic guide to a historical site, presented through a mobile device. We discuss the requirements posed by the communication context and the idea of approaching the problem through storytelling. Then we describe the application that merges the basic structure of storytelling with the requirements coming from the communication of the specific knowledge about the historical site, the user interaction issues concerning the target audience and the technological issues posed by the mobile device. Finally, we address the evaluation issues and we discuss the results with respect to storytelling. | |||
| Mobile drama in an instrumented museum: inducing group conversation via coordinated narratives | | BIBA | Full-Text | 37-61 | |
| Charles Callaway; Oliviero Stock; Elyon Dekoven; Kinneret Noy; Yael Citron; Yael Dobrin | |||
| Museum visits can be more enjoyable to small groups if they can be both social and educational experiences. One very rewarding aspect of a visit, especially those involving small groups such as families, is the unmediated group discussion that can ensue during a shared cultural experience. We present a situated, mobile museum system that delivers an hour-long drama to museum visitors. It perceives and analyzes group behavior, uses the result to dynamically deliver coordinated dramatic narrative presentations about the nearby museum exhibit, with the expected result of stimulating group discussion. To accomplish this, our drama-based presentations contain small, complementary differences in the content delivered to each participant, leveraging the narrative tension/release cycle of drama to naturally lead visitors to fill in missing pieces by interacting with friends, thus initiating a conversation. We present two evaluations for these story variations, one in a closed, non-mobile environment, and the other a formative evaluation to gauge how well the methodology used in the non-mobile evaluation performs in evaluating the fully implemented system in a real museum environment. | |||
| Mobile Urban Drama: interactive storytelling in real world environments | | BIBA | Full-Text | 63-89 | |
| Frank Allan Hansen; Karen Johanne Kortbek; Kaj Grønbæk | |||
| This article presents methods and tools for producing location-based Mobile Urban Dramas. In a Mobile Urban Drama, the user becomes the main character in a play that is presented as a multimedia production (through audio, images, animations and videos) on the user's mobile phone and in the physical surroundings. The media files are linked via tags (2D barcodes/RFID) or GPS to the real world set as the stage of the drama. The dramaturgical concept is described, and a narrative architecture is introduced. It supports a rich variety of plot graphs implemented in a software framework that supports producing Mobile Urban Dramas. Dramas produced with the framework may span from pure art pieces to structured learning experiences, for example, biology learning framed in a thriller. Experiences from six dramas produced with the framework by a Danish theatre group are discussed. The results are general findings on the concept, the narrative structure, scenographic effects and tools for technical production. | |||
| The game mechanics of pervasive applications: visiting the uncanny | | BIBA | Full-Text | 91-108 | |
| Annie Gentès; Camille Jutant | |||
| "When I use a word", Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it
means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
"The question is", said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things". "The question is", said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all". [Carroll 2007 (1865)] In pervasive games, a virtual layer with its own logic is added to the everyday, common meaning of objects, places, and people. The departure of the signifier ("things") from the signified (what they mean on the virtual level) is the semiotic process that allows for a double reading of the environment. Such a divorce has been explored in other cultural products (books, movies). It has been qualified as the "uncanny mode". This article analyzes how pervasive games use their own brand of uncanny. In particular, it shows how mobility becomes the way to uncover the hidden layers of the environment and serves as a tool to experience and eventually reduce or augment the uncanny. Finally, we can point to a typology of four main types of storytelling related to different types of mobility: games that use mimetic narrative strategies veering towards "realism"; games based on the "absurd"; "aloof" games that remain independent from places; games that present a specific play on this double reading of the world and develop the "Uncanny" as a genre. | |||
| You are the one thinking this: locative poetry as deictic writing | | BIBA | Full-Text | 109-127 | |
| Anders Sundnes Løvlie | |||
| This article presents an experiment in locative literature. Using the textopia system for sharing of literary texts through spatial annotation and locative exploration with mobile devices, a commissioned work was created for a poetry festival. The project aimed to explore how professional, renowned poets could contribute a deepened understanding of the locative medium. The texts produced show two important traits. Firstly, a particular use of deictic relationships, in which words like "you" and "here" take on a particular importance, indicating that these words work like entry points for fiction and markers of make-believe. Secondly, a preoccupation with relations of absence and presence, both temporal and spatial, producing poetic recreations of a location's memory and spatial connections to the rest of the world. | |||
| Introduction to the Special Issue on Web Accessibility | | BIB | Full-Text | 129-130 | |
| Leo Ferres | |||
| The presence of English and Spanish dyslexia in the Web | | BIBA | Full-Text | 131-158 | |
| Luz Rello; Ricardo Baeza-Yates | |||
| In this study we present a lower bound of the prevalence of dyslexia in the Web for English and Spanish. On the basis of analysis of corpora written by dyslexic people, we propose a classification of the different kinds of dyslexic errors. A representative data set of dyslexic words is used to calculate this lower bound in web pages containing English and Spanish dyslexic errors. We also present an analysis of dyslexic errors in major Internet domains, social media sites, and throughout English- and Spanish-speaking countries. To show the independence of our estimations from the presence of other kinds of errors, we compare them with the overall lexical quality of the Web and with the error rate of noncorrected corpora. The presence of dyslexic errors in the Web motivates work in web accessibility for dyslexic users. | |||
| Evaluating Web accessibility at different processing phases | | BIBA | Full-Text | 159-181 | |
| N. Fernandes; R. Lopes; L. Carriço | |||
| Modern Web sites use several techniques (e.g. DOM manipulation) that allow for the injection of new content into their Web pages (e.g. AJAX), as well as manipulation of the HTML DOM tree. This has the consequence that the Web pages that are presented to users (i.e. after browser processing) are different from the original structure and content that is transmitted through HTTP communication (i.e. after browser processing). This poses a series of challenges for Web accessibility evaluation, especially on automated evaluation software. This article details an experimental study designed to understand the differences posed by accessibility evaluation after Web browser processing. We implemented a Javascript-based evaluator, QualWeb, that can perform WCAG 2.0 based accessibility evaluations in the two phases of browser processing. Our study shows that, in fact, there are considerable differences between the HTML DOM trees in both phases, which have the consequence of having distinct evaluation results. We discuss the impact of these results in the light of the potential problems that these differences can pose to designers and developers that use accessibility evaluators that function before browser processing. | |||
| Improving accessibility to mathematical formulas: the Wikipedia Math Accessor | | BIBA | Full-Text | 183-204 | |
| J. Fuentes Sepúlveda; L. Ferres | |||
| Mathematics accessibility is an important topic for inclusive education. In this paper, we make Wikipedia's repository of mathematical formulas accessible by providing a natural language description of its more than 420,000 formulas using a well-researched sub-language. We also contribute by targeting Spanish speakers, for whom assistive technologies, particularly domain-specific technologies like the one described here, are scarce. Our focus on the semantics of formulas (rather than their visual appearance) allowed us to generate verbalizations with a precision of approximately 80% of understandable descriptions, as shown in an evaluation with sighted users. | |||
| GAPforAPE: an augmented browsing system to improve Web 2.0 accessibility | | BIBA | Full-Text | 205-229 | |
| Silvia Mirri; Paola Salomoni; Catia Prandi; Ludovico Antonio Muratori | |||
| The Web 2.0 evolution has spread more interactive technologies which affected accessibility for users who navigate the Web by using assistive technologies. In particular, the partial download of new data, the continuous refreshing, and the massive use of scripting can represent significant barriers especially for people with visual impairments, who enjoy the Web by means of screen readers. On the other hand, such technologies can be an opportunity, because they can provide a new means of transcoding Web content, making the Web more accessible. In this article we present GAPforAPE, an augmented browsing system (based on Web browsers extensions) which offers a user's profiling system and transcodes Web content according to constrains declared by users: the same Web page is provided to any user, but GAPforAPE computes adequate customizations, by exploiting scripting technologies which usually affect Web pages accessibility. GAPforAPE imitates screen readers behavior: it applies a specific set of transcoding scripts devoted to a given Web site, when available, and a default set of transcoding operations otherwise. The continuous and quick evolution of the Web has shown that a crowdsourcing system is a desirable solution, letting the transcoding scripts evolve in the same way. | |||