SIGACCESS

Welcome to the January issue of the SIGACCESS newsletter. This issue highlights the ACM ASSETS 2015 Conference. The first article written by the General and Program chairs, Yeliz Yesilada and Jeffrey Bigham, respectively, provides an overview of the conference. The following ten articles describe the research work of the students who attended the ASSETS 2015 Doctoral Consortium led by Giorgio Brajnik and Eelke Folmer.

Welcome to the October 2015 issue of the SIGACCESS newsletter. In the first article Anke Brock and Christophe Jouffrais give an overview of their research on making geographic maps accessible to visually impaired users. They developed an accessible interactive map prototype composed of a raised-line overlay, an interactive tabletop, and speech output. Their work is currently being used in some classrooms in France for teaching geography to visually impaired children. In the following article, Kotaro Hara and Jon Froehlich talk about their research work aimed at developing scalable data collection methods for remotely acquiring street-level accessibility information and novel mobile navigation and map tools. Finally, Tiago Guerreiro writes an article about the shortcomings of current mobile devices, particularly in the social domain. He then presents his on-going research in areas such as security and privacy, inconspicuous interaction, and social context awareness.

Welcome to the June 2015 issue of the SIGACCESS newsletter. In the first article, Eelke Folmer presents an innovative project that aims to use unmanned aerial robots to guide blind runners on a track. He describes a prototype and identifies some of the research challenges his lab is trying to tackle. In the next article and following his Best Paper Award at ASSETS’14, Charles Fage writes an article about his work with children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. We reports on a 3-month pilot study with 10 children in mainstreamed schools. In the third and last article, Erin Brady investigates the use of a human-powered access tool that connects people with visual impairments to sighted workers who can answer their visual questions.

Welcome to the January issue of the SIGACCESS newsletter. This issue highlights the ACM ASSETS 2014 Conference. The first article written by the General and Program chairs, Sri Kurniawan and John Richards, respectively, provides an overview of the conference. The following 9 articles describe the research work of the students who attended the ASSETS 2014 Doctoral Consortium led by Jinjuan Feng and Claude Chapdelaine.

Welcome to September 2014 SIGACCESS newsletter. Following his recent SIGCHI Social Impact Award, Richard Ladner writes a very personal article on his path to become a full-on accessibility researcher. Indeed, a very interesting reading on the why’s and how’s of his career shift from mathematics and theoretical computer science to accessibility. Along the way he leaves us with useful advices and noteworthy experiences. The second article describes BESiDE, an UK-based project, established within the context of older people’s care environments. The fundamental aim is to provide understanding towards defining the enabling and disabling elements of the built environment. The author provides an overview of on-going research, initial findings, and future work. In the third and last article, authors from University of Tokyo and IBM Research – Tokyo – describe a platform called “Senior Cloud” that supports a novel social model where seniors play an active role in society.

Welcome to June 2014 SIGACCESS newsletter. The first article in this issue presents collaborative work by Ravi Kuber, Shaojian Zhu, Yevgeniy Arber, Kirk Norman and Charlotte Magnusson that uses geomagic touch haptic devices to improve the non-visual Web browsing process. The second article by Nic Hollinworth, Kate Allen, Gosia Kwiatkowska, Andy Minnion, and Faustina Hwang discusses a project that engages people with learning disabilities as co-designers in the development of interactive sensory objects. The third article presents the work of Dr. Stephanie Ludi to improve access to math and science lecture material for visually impaired students.

This issue highlights the ACM ASSETS 2013 Conference. The first article written by Dr. Richard Ladner and Dr. Clayton Lewis provides an overview of the conference. A report on the first ASSETS captioning challenge was contributed by Dr. Raja Kushalnagar. The remaining ten articles highlight the research work of the students who attended the ASSETS 2013 doctoral consortium.

The first article in this issue presents recent research by Cynthia Putnam and Jinghui Cheng that helps therapists make more informed decisions when choosing commercial motion games to assist rehabilitation. The second article by John Schoeberlein and Yuanqiong Wang discusses a collaborative writing application for blind users. The third article by Jesica Rivero-Espinosaa, Andrés Iglesias-Péreza, Jose Antonio Gutiérrez-Dueñasa, and Xavier Rafael-Paloub discribes an AAL architecture to provide active aging services for senior users.

This issue also includes a call for participation for ASSETS 2013 in Bellevue, Washington.

The eight articles included in this issue report the research work of the students who attended the ASSETS 2012 doctoral consortium. An overview of the doctoral consortium was written by Jeffrey Bigham, chair of the successful event.