Not a left-field topic this month...Unfortunately, I could not attend the ASSETS conference this year, but I heard that it was again an excellent conference with great papers and presentations. The Full proceedings is available in ACM DL, but here I just wanted to highlight best papers:

BEST PAPER: Collaborative web accessibility improvement: challenges and possibilities

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: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1639642.1639677
BEST STUDENT PAPER: 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. Managing many visual sources of information (instructor, interpreter or captions, slides or whiteboard, classmates, and personal notes) can be a challenge. 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.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1639642.1639656
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 11th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-60558-558-1.

Labels: accessibility, ASSETS2009, conference

Can accessibility be a crucial use case to get students interested in Computer Science (CS)? I think we are all aware that there is a decline in Computer Science enrolments. In April's issue of the Communications of ACM, I saw an article in the ViewPoint column that discusses this issue and shows how working with disabled people can motivate students to study Computer Science. I think people who teach Computer Science courses would find this article interesting as it shows how accessibility can be a good use case for teaching.

Computing as Social Science

And so the message is just not getting out there. Students' firsthand experience with computers - their music and their phones - is accepted and reinforced by the image we portray in school - one of unrelenting banality and geekdom - and potential computer science students do not see themselves as having a greater impact.

At the University of Buffalo we have two senior-level courses that require teams to create real systems for real clients. They are introduced to the wider community of people with disabilities and told to make a difference. That's it. Those are the instructions. Improve the quality of life of someone less able than you. If you can't figure it out, you fail. So don't fail.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1498765.1498779
Full Proceedings: Communications of the ACM, Volume 52, Issue 4, April 2009.

Labels: accessibility, compputer science, education, social

This is the last left-field column of 2008 and I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy New Year and a happy holidays, looking forward to meeting again in 2009 with a lot of interesting left-field articles! A new workshop grabbed my attention in the ACM DL - "Proceeding of the 1st ACM workshop on Analysis and retrieval of events/actions and workflows in video streams AREA '08". I think all the papers in this proceeding would be interesting to people working on video accessibility, however I wanted to highlight one which is called "Event detection for video surveillance using an expert system". This paper presents an expert system that encodes seven rules to represent and detect seven predefined events. These events represent dangerous situations in a subway station such as someone being trapped by the door of a moving train. I wonder if such systems would be used to inform blind users about the dangerous situations in the environment.

Event detection for video surveillance using an expert system

Video Surveillance is in the center of research due to high importance of safety and security issues. Usually, humans have to monitor an area and often they have to do this for 24 hours a day. Thus, it would be desirable to have automatic surveillance systems that support this job automatically. The system described in this paper is such an automatic surveillance system that has been developed to detect several dangerous situations in a subway station. This paper discusses the high-level module of the system. Herein, an expert system is used to detect events.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1463542.1463551
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 1st ACM workshop on Analysis and retrieval of events/actions and workflows in video streams, 2008.

Labels: accessibility, video, workshop

ASSETS was a great conference again this year. There were a lot of great presentations and lots of good discussion. This month, I just wanted to highlight the papers that won the best paper awards, but I also want to note that the proceedings of ASSETS 2008 is full of great papers.

SIGACCESS Best Paper Award: Computer usage by young individuals with down syndrome: an exploratory study

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: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1414471.1414480
Full Proceedings: ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Assistive Technologies, (October 2008)
SIGACCESS Best Student Paper Award: What's new?: making web page updates accessible

Web applications facilitated by technologies such as JavaScript, DHTML, AJAX, and Flash use a considerable amount of dynamic web content that is either inaccessible or unusable by blind people. Server side changes to web content cause whole page refreshes, but only small sections of the page update, causing blind web users to search linearly through the page to find new content. The connecting theme is the need to quickly and unobtrusively identify the segments of a web page that have changed and notify the user of them. In this paper we propose Dynamo, a system designed to unify different types of dynamic content and make dynamic content accessible to blind web users. Dynamo treats web page updates uniformly and its methods encompass both web updates enabled through dynamic content and scripting, and updates resulting from static page refreshes, form submissions, and template-based web sites. From an algorithmic and interaction perspective Dynamo detects underlying changes and provides users with a single and intuitive interface for reviewing the changes that have occurred. We report on the quantitative and qualitative results of an evaluation conducted with blind users. These results suggest that Dynamo makes access to dynamic content faster, and that blind web users like it better than existing interfaces.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1414471.1414499
Full Proceedings: ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Assistive Technologies, (October 2008)

Labels: accessibility, assets2008, conference