Cognitive Web Accessibility: Assistive Technology 2009

Let's stay in touch: sharing photos for restoring social connectedness between rehabilitants, friends and family
"A case study on the use of an existing photo sharing application in a spinal cord lesion rehabilitation centre is presented. The study focuses on enhancing social connectedness through sharing photos between rehabilitants and their families and friends. Four rehabilitants participated in this study for 6-7 weeks. Most photos sent related to sharing things in everyday life and keeping the rehabilitant informed about regular events. The combination of interviews and content analysis reveals that only a minority of the photos lead to follow-up communication about the contents of the photos. Rehabilitants were positively surprised how spontaneous photo sharing simplified the way they could reconnect to their friends and family, without the immediate need or obligation to engage in a (phone) conversation."
Freedom to roam: a study of mobile device adoption and accessibility for people with visual and motor disabilities
"We interviewed 20 participants with visual and motor disabilities and asked about their current use of mobile devices, including how they select them, how they use them while away from home, and how they adapt to accessibility challenges when on the go. Following the interviews, 19 participants completed a diary study in which they recorded their experiences using mobile devices for one week. Our results show that people with visual and motor disabilities use a variety of strategies to adapt inaccessible mobile devices and successfully use them to perform everyday tasks and navigate independently."
Haptic handheld wayfinder with pseudo-attraction force for pedestrians with visual impairments
"We present the design of a new haptic direction indicator, whose purpose is to help blind pedestrians travel a path and avoid hazards intuitively and safely by means of haptic navigation. The haptic direction indicator uses a novel kinesthetic perception method called the "pseudo-attraction force" technique, which exploits the nonlinear relationship between perceived and physical acceleration to generate a force sensation. In an experiment performed to evaluate with the haptic direction indicator, we found that visually impaired users could safely walk along a predefined route at their usual walking pace, independent of the existence of auditory information."
Accessible motion-capture glove calibration protocol for recording sign language data from deaf subjects
"This paper describes the design and evaluation of a new calibration protocol for motion-capture gloves, which is designed to make the process more efficient and to be accessible for participants who are deaf and use American Sign Language (ASL)...A native ASL signer rated the correctness and understandability of the collected handshape data. The new protocol received significantly higher scores than the standard calibration. The protocol has been made freely available online, and it includes directions for the researcher, images and videos of how participants move their hands during the process, and directions for participants (as ASL videos and English text)."
ClassInFocus: enabling improved visual attention strategies for deaf and hard of hearing students
"Deaf and hard of hearing students must juggle their visual attention in current classroom settings. ClassInFocus automatically notifies students of classroom changes, such as slide changes or new speakers, helping them employ more beneficial observing strategies. A user study of notification techniques shows that students who liked the notifications were more likely to visually utilize them to improve performance"
Comparing evaluation techniques for text readability software for adults with intellectual disabilities
"We introduce our research on the development of software to automatically simplify news articles, display them, and read them aloud for adults with ID."
Enhancing Accessibility of Web Content for the Print-Impaired and Blind People
"In this paper we present SpellCast Navi, ..." which "... acquires and parses the content of web pages, converts bi-lingual text into synthetic speech using high quality speech synthesizer, and supports a set of common functionalities such as navigation through hotkeys, audible navigation lists and more."
Meta-design: Expanding Boundaries and Redistributing Control in Design
"This paper characterizes different design methodologies and identifies the unique challenges and opportunities for meta-design. It illustrates this approach with two examples ..." one of which is "...the Memory Aiding Prompting System (MAPS) (addressing the needs of people with cognitive disabilities and their caregivers) ..."
Mobile Technology for People with Cognitive Disabilities and Their Caregivers – HCI Issues
"Participants mapped future directions for exploiting technical opportunities, with a focus on people with cognitive disabilities. HCI issues that emerged as critical include profile-based configuration of user interfaces and functionality, support for spoken presentation of text content, support for viewing web content on devices with small screens, and support for remote assistance, so that users can get help when they get stuck."
Introducing the CBBC Accessible Newsreader
"... can be accessed and navigated using a single key press, or a switch device mapped to that key ...". "... for users with reading disabilities or vision impairments is dynamically generated speech via high-end voice synthesis...".