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• Evaluation of Onscreen Precompensation Algorithms for Computer Users with Visual Aberrations

  Miguel Alonso, Armando Barreto, Julie A. Jacko, Malek Adjouadi · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This paper from Florida International University and Georgia Institute of Technology presents the results of human subject testing of precompensation algorithms designed to improve onscreen image quality for computer users with visual aberrations. The approach works analogously…

  low vision · visual aberration · precompensation · image processing · deconvolution

• Observing Sara: A Case Study of a Blind Person's Interactions with Technology

  Kristen Shinohara, Josh Tenenberg · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This paper from the University of Washington, Tacoma presents a rich, in-depth case study of Sara, a congenitally blind college student, observed and interviewed across multiple sessions as she interacts with a wide range of technologies in her home. The study uses Blythe, Monk…

  blindness · assistive technology · case study · technology biographies · workarounds

• Dual Educational Electronic Textbooks: The Starlight Platform

  Dimitris Grammenos, Anthony Savidis, Yannis Georgalis, Themistoklis Bourdenas, Constantine Stephanidis · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This paper from the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH) in Crete, Greece presents Starlight, a software platform for creating and reading multimodal interactive electronic textbooks that provide a Dual User Interface — an interface concurrently accessible by…

  accessible publishing · electronic textbook · blind students · inclusive education · dual user interface

• Finger Dance: A Sound Game for Blind People

  Daniel Miller, Aaron Parecki, Sarah A. Douglas · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This paper from the University of Oregon presents Finger Dance, an original audio-based rhythm-action game designed specifically for visually impaired players. The authors take a different approach from the usual sensory substitution strategy (replacing visual elements with…

  audio game · game accessibility · blindness · rhythm-action game · sensory substitution

• Improving Accessibility of HTML Documents by Generating Image-Tags in a Proxy

  Daniel Keysers, Marius Renn, Thomas M. Breuel · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This paper from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and Technical University Kaiserslautern presents a system that automatically generates ALT tags for images on web pages by analysing image contents through a web proxy. The system addresses the…

  automatic alt text · image accessibility · web accessibility · computer vision · image retrieval

• Demo of VJ-Voicebot: Control of Robotic Arm with the Vocal Joystick

  Brandi House, Jon Malkin, Jeff Bilmes · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This demonstration paper from the University of Washington presents VJ-Voicebot, a system that allows individuals with motor disabilities to continuously control a 5 degrees-of-freedom robotic arm using non-verbal vocal sounds. The system builds on the Vocal Joystick (VJ)…

  assistive robotics · voice interface · motor impairment · continuous voice control · robotic arm

• Corpus Studies in Word Prediction

  Keith Trnka, Kathleen F. McCoy · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This paper from the University of Delaware investigates how the choice and combination of training corpora affects the performance of statistical word prediction systems for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices. The fundamental challenge is that AAC users…

  word prediction · AAC · language model · natural language processing · corpus linguistics

• Improving Accessibility to Statistical Graphs: The iGraph-Lite System

  Leo Ferres, Petro Verkhogliad, Gitte Lindgaard, Louis Boucher, Antoine Chretien, Martin Lachance · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This paper from Carleton University and Statistics Canada presents iGraph-Lite, a system that makes statistical graphs accessible to blind and visually impaired people by generating natural language descriptions and providing an interactive navigation tool for exploring graph…

  data visualization accessibility · graph accessibility · natural language generation · screen readers · blindness

• Providing Good Memory Cues for People with Episodic Memory Impairment

  Matthew L. Lee, Anind K. Dey · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This paper from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University presents two studies investigating how caregivers use cues to support episodic memory recollection in people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and what types of cues are most effective.…

  dementia · Alzheimer's disease · episodic memory · lifelogging · memory cue

• Automatic accessibility transcoding for flash content

  Daisuke Sato, Hisashi Miyashita, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This 2007 paper from IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory tackles a problem that was acute during the height of the Flash era: the near-total inaccessibility of Flash content to screen reader users. Although Flash had an accessibility framework built on Microsoft Active Accessibility…

  flash · transcoding · automatic repair · screen readers · alternative text

• aiBrowser for multimedia: introducing multimedia content accessibility for visually impaired users

  Hisashi Miyashita, Daisuke Sato, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  A companion paper to Sato et al.'s Flash-transcoding work, this 2007 paper from the same IBM Tokyo Research Lab team introduces aiBrowser — an accessible web browser purpose-built for multimedia-heavy sites of the era (ABC News Video, YouTube, Disney). The authors identify two…

  multimedia · streaming media · flash · DHTML · rich internet applications

• Accessible spaces: navigating through a marked environment with a camera phone

  Kee-Yip Chan, Roberto Manduchi, James Coughlan · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This short Assets '07 demonstration paper from UC Santa Cruz and the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute describes a camera-phone-based wayfinding system for blind travellers. The core idea is to deploy small, cheap, pie-shaped colour markers in an environment — on walls,…

  wayfinding · navigation · blindness · visual impairment · computer vision

• Feedback-based evaluation tool for web accessibility

  Daisuke Asai, Masahiro Watanabe, Yoko Asano · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This short Assets '07 demonstration paper from NTT Cyber Solutions Laboratories proposes a feedback-driven approach to improving automated web-accessibility evaluation tools. The authors frame the familiar problem that automated checkers such as Bobby only catch a fraction of…

  web accessibility · automated testing · accessibility evaluation · crowdsourcing · WCAG

• Using participatory activities with seniors to critique, build, and evaluate mobile phones

  Michael Massimi, Ronald M. Baecker, Michael Wu · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This Assets '07 paper from University of Toronto engages older adults not as subjects of a usability study but as co-designers of a mobile phone system. Massimi, Baecker, and Wu argue that the two dominant trends in 'senior-friendly' phone design — oversimplified handsets like…

  mobile accessibility · older adults · aging · participatory design · co-design

• Understanding mobile phone requirements for young adults with cognitive disabilities

  Melissa Dawe · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Melissa Dawe's Assets '07 paper is a small, qualitative, ethnographically-informed study of how five Colorado families use mobile phones to support remote communication between parents and their young-adult children (ages 19-25) with cognitive disabilities. The paper is grounded…

  cognitive accessibility · mobile accessibility · ethnography · semi-structured interviews · caregivers

• Data visualisation and data mining technology for supporting care for older people

  Nubia M. Gil, Nicolas A. Hine, John L. Arnott, Julienne Hanson, Richard G. Curry, Telmo Amaral, Dorota Osipovič · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This Assets '07 paper from a UK consortium (Dundee, UCL, Imperial College) reports on a telecare pilot study that instrumented the flats of older residents with a modest set of unobtrusive sensors — passive infrared motion detectors, pressure sensors, door contacts,…

  aging · older adults · independent living · telecare · ambient sensing

• Haptic comparison of size (relative magnitude) in blind and sighted people

  Sarah A. Douglas, Shasta Willson · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Douglas and Willson's Assets '07 paper is a controlled psychophysical study of how blind and sighted users compare relative magnitude using a PHANToM force-feedback device — the workhorse haptic input-output device of the era. The motivating problem is practical: accessibility…

  haptics · visual impairment · blindness · multimodal · psychophysics

• VoiceDraw: a hands-free voice-driven drawing application for people with motor impairments

  Susumu Harada, Jacob O. Wobbrock, James A. Landay · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Harada, Wobbrock, and Landay's Assets '07 paper introduces VoiceDraw, a hands-free digital painting application for people with severe motor impairments that uses *non-speech* vocalisations — continuously-held vowel sounds and short consonant clicks — rather than discrete speech…

  motor accessibility · voice interface · non-speech vocalisation · speech recognition · vocal joystick

• Effects of sampling methods on web accessibility evaluations

  Giorgio Brajnik, Andrea Mulas, Claudia Pitton · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Brajnik, Mulas, and Pitton's Assets '07 paper is a large, careful empirical investigation of the sampling step in web-accessibility evaluation — the step at which an evaluator picks which pages of a site to actually test. For any site above a trivial size, full coverage is…

  web accessibility · accessibility evaluation · sampling methods · accessibility metrics · conformance testing

• Semantic & syntactic context-aware text entry methods

  Jun Gong · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Jun Gong's Assets '07 demonstration paper proposes a context-aware extension to the dictionary-based predictive disambiguation (DBPD) text-entry methods — the family that included the once-ubiquitous T9 on mobile phone keypads. DBPD methods let users press each multi-letter key…

  text entry · motor impairment · visual impairment · predictive text · T9

• SADIe: exposing implicit information to improve accessibility

  Darren Lunn · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Darren Lunn's Assets '07 demonstration paper introduces SADIe (Structural-Semantics for Accessibility and Device Independence), a transcoding system from the University of Manchester that uses Semantic Web ontologies to expose the implicit visual structure of web pages to screen…

  web accessibility · transcoding · semantic web · ontology · CSS

• Equipping designers by simulating the effects of visual and hearing impairments

  Joy Goodman-Deane, Patrick M. Langdon, P. John Clarkson, Nicholas H.M. Caldwell, Ahmed M. Sarhan · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This short Assets '07 demonstration paper from the Cambridge Engineering Design Centre describes a software simulator built to help designers — especially product and communications designers, not just web designers — understand the effects of common vision and hearing…

  inclusive design · design tools · simulation · visual impairment · hearing impairment

• Performance analysis of an integrated eye gaze tracking / electromyogram cursor control system

  Craig A. Chin, Armando Barreto, J. Gualberto Cremades, Malek Adjouadi · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Chin, Barreto, Cremades, and Adjouadi's Assets '07 demonstration paper from Florida International University evaluates a hybrid cursor-control system that combines eye-gaze tracking (EGT) with electromyogram (EMG) input from facial muscles, targeted at users with motor…

  eye tracking · electromyogram · cursor control · motor accessibility · multimodal input

• Improving the outcomes of students with cognitive and learning disabilities: phase I development for a web accessibility tool

  Aaron Andersen, Cyndi Rowland · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This poster paper from ASSETS 2007 reports on Phase I of a project to extend the WAVE (Web Accessibility Versatile Evaluator) open-source tool with a new suite of evaluators specifically targeting the cognitive load of web pages. The work, led by WebAIM and the National Center…

  cognitive accessibility · cognitive disabilities · learning disabilities · cognitive load · evaluation tools

• SIBYLLE: a system for alternative communication adapting to the context and its user

  Tonio Wandmacher, Jean-Yves Antoine, Franck Poirier · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This paper describes the latest version of SIBYLLE, an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) system developed at the Université François Rabelais and the Université Européenne de Bretagne for users with severe motor and speech impairments — including cerebrally and…

  augmentative and alternative communication · AAC · word prediction · virtual keyboard · single switch