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