| "Foreword" | | BIB | PDF | 1 | |
| Alfred Kobsa; Constantine Stephanidis | |||
| Road Blocks and On Ramps to Universal Design of the WWW | | BIBA | PDF | 1 | |
| Jon Gunderson | |||
| The WWW is rapidly becoming the medium of choice for communication in the new international economic, social and educational revolution the world is facing at the start of the next millennium. WWW based technologies are changing the way people communicate throughout the world, and the ability to use WWW based technologies is becoming an important literacy skill. People with the ability use WWW technologies and participate in the transformation and creation of new WWW information are going to have many more opportunities in this emerging society than people who do not. Universal design must be a part of these new technologies if people with a wide range of capabilities are going to have an equal opportunity to participate. People with permanent disabilities, people who are older, and people with temporary disabilities and people using technology that "impairs" them need to be considered if there is going to be equal access for all. | |||
| The Merging of Senses: Auditory-Visual Attention Control After Biological Examples | | BIBA | PDF | 1 | |
| Hans-Heinrich Bothe | |||
| Hans-Heinrich Bothe is experimenting in the "Assistive Technologies -- Multimedia -- Robotics" triangle with generic speech recognition/processing algorithms controlling lip-movements of an artificial robotic head or a GUI-based virtual human face. These user interfaces are meant to enable the hard of hearing and more so the deaf to interact/communicate with able-bodied people under asynchronous and/or spatially decentralized conditions by lipreading. Such an application environment has obvious Dual Use/Design for All implications within a comprehensive UI4All framework, which -- beyond Assistive Technologies -- reaches out to speech-controlled robotics as well. | |||
| The 'Technology Push' and The User Tailored Information Environment | | BIBA | PDF | 6 | |
| Mary P. Zajicek; Albert G. Arnold | |||
| The authors of this paper wholeheartedly support the International Scientific Forum 'Toward an Information Society for All' initiative. We aim to contribute to discussion of the 'users' trajectory towards an Information Society for all as defined in 'Toward an Information Society for All: HCI Challenges and R&D Recommendations' (Stephanidis et al, 1999). A broadening of the definition of user requirements for the user tailored information environment, is suggested, to include off-line support for those members of the community who do not have the personal capital to support participation in the Information Society. These individuals are often reluctant to become involved in Information Technology and lack confidence. They find it threatening and difficult and frequently lack the resources to see ahead to the benefits that will accrue. These issues should be addressed if we are to 'push' the use of Information Technology into these previously excluded populations. This paper discusses theoretical approaches to the problem and drawing on experience gained while working with two such user groups, proposes an initial framework of measures to support their take-up of Information Technology. | |||
| What Users Expect from Future Terminal Devices: Empirical Results from an Expert Survey | | BIBA | PDF | 9 | |
| Castulus Kolo; Michael Friedewald | |||
| For the acceptance of future network-based media services the technical advancement of the man-machine interface is of great importance. The Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI) in Karlsruhe has conducted an expert survey on different acceptance factors, on the future development of media usage behavior, on network infrastructure and terminal devices as well as on the expected market development. Drawing on the results we point out perspectives in the light of today's user needs and the technical possibilities. | |||
| SELECT: Social and Collaborative Filtering of Web Documents and News | | BIBA | PDF | 14 | |
| We describe the goals and progress to date of SELECT, a project funded under
the EC Telematics Applications Programme. The objective of the SELECT project
is to help Internet users to find the most reliable, valuable, important and
interesting information quickly and easily and reduce information overload.
SELECT is aimed not only at users who search for specific information, but also
at those who use the Internet to keep up to date with what is happening in
particular areas. In these ways, SELECT Will make a positive contribution to
the problem of helping users to tailor their information environments to meet
their individual needs.
The approach adopted in SELECT is based upon information filtering. SELECT makes use of two filtering techniques. One is to make recommendations derived from an individual user's past choices. The other is to make recommendations derived from the behaviour of other users through social, collaborative filtering, especially those who have displayed similar tastes and interests in the past. Both techniques make use of users' ratings of Internet documents, either given explicitly or derived implicitly from evidence of users' behaviour. | |||
| Perception of Pictures Without Graphical Interface | | BIBAK | PDF | 6 | |
| Zdenek Mikovec; Pavel Slavik | |||
| This paper deals with a problem of handling of graphical information in an
environment with some limitation. The problem arises when the work with
graphical information is limited or impossible at all. The limitations can be
either on user side (disabilities) or on the side of a system (small screen in
case of handheld devices). This means that it is necessary to apply some
effective access to graphical information in such an environment. Textual
information can be accessed without any problem and the solution is to work
with textual description of the picture. Such a description should allow
information filtering, as the structure of graphical information can be
complicated. In order to describe a picture in textual form we will use a XN4L
based grammar. Its use will allow us to automize creation of tools for
creation of picture description and browsing. A system has been implemented
that allows the user to access graphical information without graphical
interaction. In the case of handheld devices the textual communication could
serve as a preview in order to get closer to the area of interest in a picture.
This area can be displayed by limited graphical means. The system has been
successfully tested with a good response from potential users. Keywords: Picture description, Mobile computing, Grammar, XML, Graphical interaction,
Blind users | |||
| Ontology-Based Query Translation for Legislative Information Retrieval | | BIBA | PDF | 12 | |
| Kuldar Taveter; Aarno Lehtola; Kristina Jaaranen; Juha Sorva; Catherine Bounsaythip | |||
| The paper presents a conceptual approach that helps non-expert users to find legislative documents from textual databases. The concepts and inter-concept relationships of each legal domain involved are modeled by an ontology. Terms describing a concept at different levels of accuracy are attached to the concept, and a weight expressing the level of accuracy is associated with each of them. Initial queries presented by the user are matched against these terms. Thereafter the user is shown a graphical representation of the relevant subpart of the ontology that he can use for refining the query. The conceptual approach is preferred over traditional thesaurus because legal terms depend on the differences in law systems that can be expressed by ontologies. | |||
| User Testing in Industry: A Case Study of Laboratory, Workshop, and Field Tests | | BIBA | PDF | 14 | |
| Morten Hertzum | |||
| Applied user testing involves more usability evaluation methods than laboratory tests and is critically dependent upon a number of issues seldom treated in the literature. The development of the system described in this longitudinal, diary-based study evolved around five user tests: a laboratory test, a workshop test, and three field tests. The user tests had a substantial impact on the focus of the entire development effort in that 25% of the primary developer's time was spent solving problems encountered during the tests. The laboratory test made use of set tasks and was biased toward how tasks were performed with the system, at the expense of what tasks could be performed. The workshop test was more informal and apparently led the users to adopt a more exploratory attitude. Careful arousal and management of the users' commitment to participate actively proved essential to effective user testing, especially during the field tests. | |||
| Towards the Generation of Tutorial Courses for Application | | BIBA | PDF | 16 | |
| F. Garcia | |||
| In this paper we describe the underlying ideas of a system for the development of tutorial courses for interactive applications. This environment makes use of the user interface design technology based on declarative interface models. In particular, it uses hierarchical user task models to provide the designers with the possibility of generating tutorial courses about how to use highly interactive applications. The aim is both to reduce the generation and maintenance costs for the design of these tutorial courses and to build more dynamic and powerful tutorial course systems. The environment we propose is based on two separated modules. The first one, Advanced-HATS, is aimed to deal with the interactive teaching of isolated user tasks. In order to teach users how to perform a particular user task, this module uses the information in the user task model and the information provided by the underlying user task management system at run-time. The second module, the scenario execution module, is in charge of preparing the adequate scenarios for the first module to teach the users. Finally, CACTUS, a prototype tool implementing these ideas, is introduced. | |||
| Accessibility Guidelines and Scope of Formative HCI Design Input: Contrasting Two Perspectives | | BIBA | PDF | 11 | |
| C. Stephanidis; D. Akoumianakis | |||
| The accessibility of interactive computer-based products and services has long been an issue of concern to both the Assistive Technology and HCI communities. Though progress has been slow, there have been several efforts aiming to document the consolidated wisdom in the form of general guidelines and examples of best practice. Despite their sound human factors content, these guidelines require substantial interpretation by designers before they can generate practically useful and context-specific recommendations. In this paper, we examine how different engineering perspectives in the implementation of guidelines may influence the quality of the final products. | |||
| Integrating Universal Design into a Global Approach for Managing Very Large Web Sites | | BIBA | PDF | 17 | |
| Michael Cooper; Quentin Limbourg; Celine Mariage; Jean Vanderdonckt | |||
| Very Large Web Sites are a particular category of web sites where the potential of traditional evaluation process for ensuring usability is significantly contracted by the size of the web site. Since this kind of web site is authored, designed, evaluated, and maintained by a wide variety of people who have specific information demands over a huge set of web pages, we believe that Universal Design principles should be integrated into the current approach for managing such web sites. We propose to support Universal Design principles by integrating related guidelines into a global approach for managing Very Large Web Sites. This approach is supported by Extended Bobby, an extension of the Bobby tool that provides (i) evaluation on demand; (ii) a repair tool that proposes to authors of web pages new HTML code fixing usability problems that Extended Bobby itself has merely identified and explained; (iii) a usability site tracker that keeps track of usability problems of the web sites, automatically sends e-mails to authors with the repair proposal, and helps site managers and webmasters to manage the pages evolving in time. | |||
| Access to Computer-Assisted Learning Environments for Severely Handicapped Children by Semantic Level Adaptations | | BIBA | PDF | 8 | |
| Henrike Gappa; Stefanie Mermet | |||
| Within the project CATI (Computer-Aided Therapeutic Intervention) new potentials and limitations of computer-supported multimedia applications for the therapeutic advancement of severely handicapped children are investigated. In this context, we are conducting a case study involving a 12-year old physically handicapped child with behaviour typical of autism. A memory game featuring various individualised semantic adaptations was developed for the training of metacognitive skills. The design of the training adopts procedures used for cognitive behaviour modification. A significant other defined as a person with high social and rewarding power is used for instructional purposes in the computer-assisted learning environment. It is to investigate how the readiness to attend and the achievement motivation can be enhanced by the implementation of such a person. First results show that the motivation to stay on task is developing and the goal of achieving problem solving techniques appears to be attainable. | |||
| Tailorability and Usability Engineering: A Roadmap to Convergence | | BIBAK | PDF | 15 | |
| Alex Totter; Chris Stary | |||
| Tailorability enables user interfaces to be adapted to particular needs of
end users and organizations. When developers target towards the construction
of user interfaces providing that kind of flexibility, they experience support
at the level of testing rather than designing. In search for design support
usability evaluation techniques might be used to provide early feedback from
end user to designers. In this paper we put methodological and conceptual
knowledge from usability evaluation into the context of designing tailorable
user interfaces. In doing so, tailorability is related to existing principles
of human-centered design. As a consequence, tailorability in its very
technical nature has to be considered as an enabling feature for
individualization. Thus, it facilitates the implementation of principles of
human-centered design. Becoming part of design tools ensures final convergence
of tailorability and usability engineering. Keywords: Tailorability, Usability engineering, Comparative analysis, Conceptual
framework, Definition | |||
| Software Documentation with Animated Agents | | BIBA | PDF | 15 | |
| Fiorella de Rosis; Berardina De Carolis; Sebastiano Pizzutilo | |||
| We show how a formal model of interaction can be employed to generate documentation on how to use an application, in the form of an Animated Agent. The formal model we employ is XDM (Context-Sensitive Dialog Modeling), an extension of Coloured Petri Nets that enables representing user-adapted interfaces, simulating their behaviour in different contexts and making semiautomatic pre-empirical evaluations of consistency and complexity. XDM-Agent is a personality-rich animated character that uses this formal model to illustrate the role of interface objects and to explain which tasks may be performed and how they may be performed. The behaviour of this agent is programmed by a schema-based planning (the agent's 'Mind'), followed by a surface generation (its 'Body'), in which verbal and nonverbal acts are combined appropriately. The agent's personality, that is the way its Mind is programmed and its Body appears to the user, may be adapted to the user characteristics. The potential interest of applying to software documentation the HCI metaphor of 'interacting with a friend' is discussed. | |||
| Knowledge-Based and Layout-Driven Adaptive Information Presentations on the World Wide Web | | BIBA | PDF | 16 | |
| George Vouros | |||
| The paper presents on-going research towards generic tools and methods for fulfilling the combined needs of information producers and consumers. It presents the principles, framework and key issues of our research, and focuses on developments concerning INFO-PRESENTER. This is an interactive system that provides knowledge-based and layout-driven information presentations, intending to satisfy the idiosyncrasies of information consumers, supporting a great amount of tailoring information to their needs, interests, preferences and background knowledge. The paper focuses mostly on themes concerning knowledge representation and layout specifications. The representation framework provides a general model for the specification of information requirements in terms of media-independent information item categories and types of information views for realising information. Layout specifications provide generic rules for tailoring information delivery, in conjunction with the information specifications. To facilitate user-tailored information production, information and layout specifications should be structured and encoded so as to facilitate their cost-effective creation and maintenance, in relation to their effective utilization for user-tailored information presentations. | |||
| Universal Access in the Work-Place: A Case Study | | BIBA | PDF | 7 | |
| Simeon Keates; John Clarkson; Joanne Coy; Peter Robinson | |||
| Universal Access belongs not only in the research laboratory, but also in an
industrial environment. Many countries have set out specific legal requirements
for companies to meet in terms of proportions of staff with disabilities and
meeting those requirements is a new experience for many employers. More
enlightened companies wish to take their commitment beyond meeting the letter
of the law and to provide a genuinely inclusive work-place. However,
implementing such an approach is complex.
The principal aim of this paper is to describe the steps being taken by The Post Office (TPO), with the assistance of the University of Cambridge, to offer a more inclusive work-place to support a wider range of employee physical capabilities. Computer access, including interface and input system design issues, features very prominently in research at Cambridge. An approach taken to assess the potential for universal access within the TPO environment is described and the relative merits of adaptive and proactive design methods discussed. Although the case study presented is very specific and still in its preliminary stages, the generic usability issues are applicable to a wider range of computer applications. | |||
| Rapid Development and Evaluation of Interactive Systems | | BIBA | PDF | 6 | |
| Jorg Marrenbach | |||
| The interaction between humans and machines is ubiquitous in daily life.
Some interaction techniques are more efficient or effective than others for
certain tasks or users. During the development of new systems, the user is
referred frequently too late into the development process. This is due to the
fact that a prototype does not exist to verify the system by the user.
This article outlines some ideas regarding the relationship between the systems specification and the user requirements at this early stage of the design process through the use of an appropriate specification tool. This tool has been developed by the Department of Technical Computer Science that enables the designer to create models of tasks, users, and devices and to connect these models to visualise the relations between them. | |||
| Finding the Common Ground for Legacy Interfaces | | BIBA | PDF | 15 | |
| Chris Roast; Richard Brophy; Andy Bowdin | |||
| It is well established within interface development that user requirements
are conventionally identified and documented prior to design and
implementation. With the growing uptake of information technology the
development process also needs to manage the re-engineering of legacy systems.
Re-engineering not only provides an opportunity to enhance user interface
quality, but also to broaden the user base.
This paper reports on the techniques developed in the re-engineering of two distinct legacy systems with the aim of identifying and meeting common user requirements for both. More generally, it is proposed that these techniques should benefit user-centred design in the context of widening user bases. | |||
| Non Visual Presentation of HTML documents for Disabled and Elderly Using Extended Cascading Style Sheets | | BIBA | PDF | 7 | |
| Ph. Truillet; N. Vigouroux | |||
| The aim of this paper is to propose the expression of the CARE (Complementarity, Assignment, Redundancy, Equivalence) properties for non visual multimodal presentation of electronic documents within the extended Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) formalism. Firstly the CARE properties and the CSS formalism are briefly described. Then, we present two synchronization and logical operators in order to convey the Complementarity and the Assignment properties of CARE. Some illustrations are given. | |||
| User Interfaces for Visually Impaired People | | BIBA | PDF | 6 | |
| Robert Batusek; Ivan Kopeeek | |||
| Some aspects of the user interfaces and spoken language dialogue systems
developed for visually impaired users are presented in the paper. First, we
discuss specific requirements of visually impaired users to user interfaces of
applications and dialogue systems. The paper further deals with some specific
elements of the dialogue system design that can be used to enhance the
effectiveness of the communication between blind user and dialogue systems.
Next, the basic communication module used in the dialogue systems we are presently developing is outlined We also present a brief description of two applications developed by the Natural Language Processing Group at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University Brno; the dialogue programming system DL4LOG and the speech oriented hypertext system A UDIS. Both systems are developed primarily for visually impaired users, especially for blind programmers and students. | |||
| Evaluating Adaptable and Adaptive User Interfaces: Lessons Learned from the Development of the AVANTI Web Browser | | BIBA | PDF | 6 | |
| Constantine Stephanidis; Alexandros Paramythis; Michael Sfyrakis | |||
| One of the critical issues in the development of adaptable and adaptive user interfaces concerns the lack of appropriate evaluation methods and techniques. Existing approaches cannot be used to assess the way and extent to which the adaptation facilities of the interface affect interaction qualities such as accessibility and usability. This paper reports on the particular approach taken within the development of the AVANTI Web browser for the assessment of the adaptation characteristics of the user interface. Based on the practical experience gained, a number of requirements have emerged towards the development of generic methods and techniques for evaluating adaptation-capable user interfaces. | |||
| Learning from the Art: The Art on the User Interface | | BIBAK | PDF | 2 | |
| M. Gea; J. Rodeiro | |||
| The computer is a tool used to accomplish goals. The computer programs are
creative task, and the user interface is the way to achieve to the goals that
the computer programs perform. In this context, the user interface should play
a creative role too, mixed up with the proper work itself This paper proposes
an alternative way of building user interfaces according to this concept, and
applying techniques widely used in art. Keywords: Visual design, Interface metaphors, Adaptable user interaction | |||
| The Productive Information Society: A Basis for Sustainability | | BIBA | PDF | 2 | |
| W. Goehring | |||
| The central problem of the 21st century lies in the growing consumption of fossil fuel, of energy, of raw material for industrial products, and of agricultural areas for towns and industries, in the devastation of immense areas, in the greenhouse effect resulting from the emission of C02 and other gases, in the elimination of traditional social relations, and in the mechanical and informational rationalization of labor. Mastering this 21C problem men will alter considerably technical production and social relations which are founded in the way how men determine what is needed and how they acquire the needed things. | |||
| Dialogue Interface for Programming in Prolog | | BIBA | PDF | 2 | |
| Andriana Jergova | |||
| In the last few years spoken interfaces are often used in the
telephone-based querying systems, voice-controlled systems, etc. For the
visually impaired users or users with other disabilities they can bring new
opportunities to overcome some of the difficulties resulted from their
handicap. At Laboratory of Acoustics and Phonetics at Masaryk University we
are developing programming environments for various languages that facilitate
the task of programming for blind programmers as the conventional programming
environments are extremely inconvenient for them [4, 5].
Here we present a dialogue conception of spoken programming environment for Prolog language that is designed for visually impaired programmers. It addresses specific issues that arise in process of programming by means of spoken interface without possibility of visual checking. Advantages and problems related to sequential input, structured input, and semantic input are compared. Employment of spoken interface in the applications where graphical interface is serviceable needs special techniques and strategies to be adopted. In the case of programming by means of spoken interface the communication between the user and the system involves several interfering areas and levels-input of text (source code), speech informational feedback providing the source code overview, system commands, help (explication, guidance), and metacommunication (clarifications, repairs). In this paper we concentrate our attention to the first two mentioned areas and we suggest the representation of the treated text (programs in Prolog) which allow us to exploit advantages of the spoken input and to compensate impossibility of visual checking. The main goals are * elimination of syntactic errors, * reduction of semantic errors and support for their search and correction, and * support for good orientation in the program source. | |||
| A Universally Accessible ATM or Information Kiosk | | BIB | ||
| I-M. Jonsson; N. Scott | |||
| Hippie: A Nomadic Information System | | BIBA | PDF | 2 | |
| Reinhard Oppermann; Marcus Specht; Igor Jaceniak; Ruediger Huettenhain | |||
| Hippie [1] is an internet-based guide offering added value to current
information facilities by sup-porting the multiplicity of activities during the
preparation, the execution and the evaluation of a museum/fair visit'. The
process orientation is made possible by the nomadic characteristic [2] of the
system that allows the user to have access to his or her personal information
space from all places independently from specific devices. The context takes
into account the current location and direction of the user, his personal
characteristics like knowledge and interests and the environmental conditions
like physical arrangements and technical tools.
Before a visit a user can browse all exhibits, prepare tours, and mark individual hotspots. The information selected and presented is adapted to the interests, the knowledge and the presentation preferences of the user [3]. During the actual visit augmented reality components for artwork interpretation and mainly audio output complement the visual modality preoccupied by the physical environment. Furthermore position tracking and location systems in the exhibition place allow for the adaptation of hippie to the current visitor position (at home or in front of a certain exhibit). The system automatically identifies the relevant objects close to the visitor and multi-modal in-formation presentation takes into account the specific environmental constraints for information perception in the physical context. Two main elements for the process orientation of the system, the internet-based personal information space and the learning capability of the system of the evolving knowledge and interest of the visitor, are described below in some more detail. | |||