Best Paper Award

The SIGACCESS Best Paper Award is presented to the individual(s) judged by an awards committee to have written the best paper appearing in the ASSETS conference proceedings. Recipients are presented with a certificate from ACM at the conference. The following have been awarded:

2009

Collaborative Web Accessibility Improvement: Challenges and Possibilities

Author(s):
Hironobu Takagi, Shinya Kawanaka, Masatomo Kobayashi, Daisuke Sato and Chieko Asakawa
Institution:
IBM Research, Yamato, Japan
Abstract:
Collaborative accessibility improvement has great potential to make the Web more adaptive in a timely manner by inviting users into the improvement process. The Social Accessibility Project is an experimental service for a new needs-driven improvement model based on collaborative metadata authoring technologies. In 10 months, about 18,000 pieces of metadata were created for 2,930 webpages through collaboration. We encountered many challenges as we sought to create a new mainstream approach. The productivity of the volunteer activities exceeded our expectation, but we found large and important problems in the screen reader users' lack of awareness of their own accessibility problems. In this paper, we first introduce examples, analyze some statistics from the pilot service and then discuss our findings and challenges. Three future directions including site-wide authoring are considered.
Full Paper:
Available from the ACM Digital Library

2008

Computer Usage by Young Individuals With Down Syndrome: An Exploratory Study

Author(s):
Jinjuan Feng 1, Jonathan Lazar 1, Libby Kumin 1, and Ant Ozok 2
Institution:
  1. Loyola College, Baltimore, USA
  2. UMBC, Baltimore, USA
Abstract:
In this paper, we discuss the results of an online survey that investigates how children and young adults with Down syndrome use computers and computer-related devices. The survey responses cover 561 individuals with Down syndrome between the age of four to 21. The survey results suggest that the majority of the children and young adults with Down syndrome can use the mouse to interact with computers, which requires spatial, cognitive, and fine motor skills that were previously believed to be quite challenging for individuals with Down syndrome. The results show great difficulty in text entry using keyboards. Young individuals with Down syndrome are using a variety of computer applications and computer related devices, and computers and computer-related devices play important roles in the life of individuals with Down syndrome. There appears to be great potential in computer-related education and training to broaden existing career opportunities for individuals with Down syndrome, and there needs to be further research on this topic.
Full Paper:
Available from the ACM Digital Library

2007

Evaluating American Sign Language Generation Through the Participation of Native ASL Signers

Author(s):
Matt Huenerfauth 1, Liming Zhao 2, Erdan Gu 2 and Jan Allbeck 2
Institution:
  1. The City University of New York, USA
  2. University of Pennsylvania, USA
Abstract:
We discuss important factors in the design of evaluation studies for systems that generate animations of American Sign Language (ASL) sentences. In particular, we outline how some cultural and linguistic characteristics of members of the American Deaf community must be taken into account so as to ensure the accuracy of evaluations involving these users. Finally, we describe our implementation and user-based evaluation (by native ASL signers) of a prototype ASL generator to produce sentences containing classifier predicates, frequent and complex spatial phenomena that previous ASL generators have not produced.
Full Paper:
Available from the ACM Digital Library

2006

Improvements In Vision-Based Pointer Control

Author(s):
Rick Kjeldsen
Institution:
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA
Abstract:
Vision-based head trackers have been around for some years and are even beginning to be commercialized, but problems remain with respect to usability. Users without the ability to use traditional pointing devices - the intended audience of such systems - have no alternative if the automatic boot strapping process fails, there is room for improvement in face tracking, and the pointer movement dynamics do not support accurate and efficient pointing. This paper describes a novel head tracking pointer that addresses these problems.
Full Paper:
Available from the ACM Digital Library

2005

Representing Coordination and Non-Coordination in an American Sign Language Animation

Author(s):
Matt Huenerfauth
Institution:
University of Pennsylvania, USA
Abstract:
While strings and syntax trees are used by the Natural Language Processing community to represent the structure of spoken languages, these encodings are difficult to adapt to a signed language like American Sign Language (ASL). In particular, the multichannel nature of an ASL performance makes it difficult to encode in a linear single-channel string. This paper will introduce the Partition/Constitute (P/C) Formalism, a new method of computationally representing a linguistic signal containing multiple channels. The formalism allows coordination and non-coordination relationships to be encoded between different portions of a signal. The P/C formalism will be compared to representations used in related research in gesture animation. The way in which P/C is used by this project to build an English-to-ASL machine translation system will also be discussed.
Full Paper:
Available from the ACM Digital Library

2004

Text Entry From Power Wheelchairs: EdgeWrite for Joysticks and Touchpads

Author(s):
Jacob O. Wobbrock 1, Brad A. Myers 1, Htet Htet Aung 1, and Edmund F. LoPresti 2
Institution:
  1. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA
  2. A.T. Sciences, Inc., Pittsburgh, USA
Abstract:
Power wheelchair joysticks have been used to control a mouse cursor on desktop computers, but they offer no integrated text entry solution, confining users to point-and-click or point-and-dwell with on-screen keyboards. But on-screen keyboards reduce useful screen real-estate, exacerbate the need for frequent window management, and impose a second focus of attention. By contrast, we present two integrated gestural text entry methods designed for use from power wheelchairs: one for joysticks and the other for touchpads. Both techniques are adaptations of EdgeWrite, originally a stylus-based unistroke method designed for people with tremor. In a preliminary study of 7 power wheelchair users, we found that touchpad EdgeWrite was faster than joystick WiVik, and joystick EdgeWrite was only slightly slower after minimal practice. These findings reflect “walk up and use”-ability and warrant further investigation into extended use.
Full Paper:
Available from the ACM Digital Library

2002

Site-Wide Annotation: Reconstructing Existing Pages to Be Accessible

Author(s):
Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa, Kentarou Fukuda and Junji Maeda
Institution:
IBM Japan, Yamato-shi, Kanagawa-ken, Japan
Abstract:
The Web has become a new information resource for the blind. However, Web accessibility is becoming worse, since page authors tend to care only for the visual appearance. We have developed an Accessibility Transcoding System to solve this problem. This system has the ability to transcode complete pages on annotated sites into totally accessible pages without changing the original pages. However, site-wide annotation authoring is an extremely tedious and time-consuming task. This prevented us from applying our transcoding system to a wide variety of sites. In order to overcome this difficulty, we developed a new algorithm, “Dynamic Annotation Matching”. By utilizing this algorithm, our transcoding system can automatically determine appropriate annotations based on each page's layout. We also developed a site-wide annotation-authoring tool, “Site Pattern Analyzer”. We evaluated the feasibility of creating site-wide annotations by using the algorithm and the tool, and report on our success here.
Full Paper:
Available from the ACM Digital Library

2000

An Empirical Investigation of Ways in Which Some of the Problems Encountered by Some Dyslexics May Be Alleviated Using Computer Techniques

Author(s):
Peter Gregor and Alan F. Newell
Institution:
University of Dundee, Dundee, Scotland
Abstract:
This research describes the development of a highly configurable word processing environment to alleviate some of the difficulties encountered by dyslexics when producing and reading text. It also describes a pragmatic, empirical methodology, closely involving dyslexic users, which has proved highly effective.

All dyslexic subjects tested were able to use the software to identify and store a configuration of background and foreground colour, text typeface and font, and spacing between characters, words and lines which they found easier to read than the default settings. Successful tests were also carried out to investigate the use of different appearances (font, colour etc.) to alleviate character recognition and reversal problems.
Full Paper:
Available from the ACM Digital Library

1998

User Interface of a Home Page Reader

Author(s):
Chieko Asakawa and Takashi Itoh
Institution:
IBM Japan, Yamato-shi, Kanagawa-ken, Japan
Abstract:
We first discuss the difficulties that blind people face in trying to live in society, because of the lack of accessible information resources, and then consider the potential of the Web as a new information resource for the blind. After describing how blind people in Japan currently access the Web, we give an overview of our system for nonvisual Web access. Our system has five special characteristics. One is the use of a numeric keypad for surfing the Net, with a key assignment designed for intuitive operation. The second is a fast-forward key for quick reading. The next two are that hyperlinks are read in a female voice and HTML tags are converted into voice data. The fifth is that the system can be synchronized with Netscape Navigator. After evaluating the system and offering some conclusions, we discuss our plans for future work.
Full Paper:
Available from the ACM Digital Library