Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This study presents a model to design and implement mobile applications to support the displacement and dynamic decision making of users with visual disabilities. To identify the real added value of using mobile technologies as support aids for decision making in dynamic contexts for users with visual disabilities, we provide an application case. By using a graph to represent the computer model of a real school for blind children, for whom a system was already developed using our model, we provide a real example application of this model. This provided enough input to enrich, improve and redesign the model; ending up with a usable mobile application model to assist the mobility and orientation of blind users.

GUI builder tools are widely used in practice to develop the user interface of software systems. Typically they are visual programming tools that support direct-manipulative assembling of the user interface components. We have developed the tool GuiBuilder which follows a model-driven approach to the development of graphical (multimedia) user interfaces. This allows a meta-design approach where user interface developers as well as prospective users of the system are supported in modelling the desired functionality of the GUI on a high level of abstraction that is easy to understand for all involved stakeholders. The model consists of compositional presentation diagrams to model the structure of the user interface and hierarchical statechart diagrams to model its behaviour. GuiBuilder then supports the transformation of the model to Java, i.e., the generation of a working user interface and the simulation of the modelled behaviour. Interactive sessions with the user interface can be recorded and replayed.

The “NateOn” messenger is the most popular messenger in Korea (It has 17,160,000 users in Korea). In this paper, we will analyze the security of authentication mechanism of the NateOn. We will show that the “NateOn Ver 3.5.15.0(600)” is very vulnerable to the replay attack and the dictionary attack. Furthermore, we will show that other messengers such as “BuddyBuddy Ver 5.8” (It has 5,980,000 users in Korea), “Daum Touch Ver 5.06101300” (It has 2,384,000 users in Korea), etc. have the similar security problems.

The advances in computer and communication technologies increased both the number of users and the amount of data shared over the Network. Many times the amount of complex and articulated information available makes it difficult to retrieve what is really required for a given task. For these reasons, the efficient, easy and trustworthy transfer of data is now of paramount importance in many everyday scenarios, especially concerning environments and situations where security and data protection are mandatory. On the other hand, data protection often implies the adoption of security means which create virtual (and sometimes even physical) barriers to data retrieval. In this paper, advanced identification technologies, based on the processing of biometric data, are presented. These techniques provide a number of tools to facilitate the seamless human interaction with the data, and the security barriers, by enabling the environment to recognize and learn from the user, shaping the data available on the basis of his/her identity. The presented techniques are based on the extraction of invariant features from face and fingerprint images to process static biometric features, also allowing the enhancement of identification accuracy by data fusion.

Among the variety of heuristics evaluation methods available, four paramount approaches have emerged: Nielsen’s ten usability heuristics, Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design, Tognazzini’s First Principles of Interaction Design, and a set of principles based on Edward Tufte’s visual display work. To simplify access to a comprehensive set of heuristics, this paper describes an approach to integrate existing approaches (i.e., identify overlap, combine conceptually related heuristics) in a single table hereafter referred to as the Multiple Heuristics Evaluation Table (MHET). This approach also seeks to update these approaches by addressing existing gaps and providing concrete examples that illustrate the application of concepts. Furthermore, the authors identify three decision factors that support meaningful communication among stakeholders (e.g., product managers, engineers) and apply them to the MHET heuristics. Finally, this paper discusses the practical implications and limitations of the MHET.

Current experience shows that vocational context has a vital role to play in research on inclusive information society technology, for at least four reasons. First, the occurrence of disabilities has a major impact on employability and employment. However, the potentially significant contribution of accessible and usable information society technology (IST) in employment has yet to make more than little difference in practice. Context of use is still often ignored. In other words, to ensure that applications can achieve as broad a customer base as possible, they are often designed for generic, rather than specific, cases. While this enables those applications to support a wide variety of use-case scenarios, the corollary is that not as much specific support is afforded to individual use-case scenarios as when designed for a more focused sets of tasks. Second, despite the impressive increases in computing power, innovations in interactive design, such as 3-D user interfaces (UIs), are rarely incorporated into mainstream IST products. One of the fundamental principles taught to most software UI designers is that of ’consistency’, i.e. that similar functions should look the same and behave in similar ways across a variety of applications. The benefit of this approach is that once a user is familiar with the interaction metaphors being used, it will take minimal time to learn to use a new and unfamiliar application. The flipside of this principle, though, is that it can stifle the development of new and innovative UI techniques, because they will not be ’consistent’ with existing applications and UI designs. Greater emphasis upon the context of use in general and the vocational, educational and lifestyle context in particular could lead to better user uptake, as the resultant UI would be better suited to the individual needs ands wants of each particular user. This better uptake, in turn, gives better feedback to mainstream system designers. Third, without context, the identification of user and system characteristics is an unbounded problem. There are simply too many possible different design options to manage easily. The consideration of vocational or recreational context significantly reduces the scale of the problem and renders it more manageable.Fourth, accessibility research in a vocational context ensures that the participants not only gain indirectly from it but benefit directly too, often gaining an improved vocational standing. If so, emerging design methods like unified user interface design (UUID) methods should place much more concentration on the vocational context of use.

There is a growing body of evidence that key components of human cognition can be used to identify important aspects of accessibility design for universal access in the information society, through user modelling. However, there is an equal growth in an appreciation of the contexts within which any interactive system must function, including the vocational and social contexts. If so, there is an important need is to extend cognitive user models to respond to and make predictions about the vocational and social contexts that make up the information society. Whilst many aspects of social intelligence can, it seems, be subsumed under current cognitive architectures of the user, there is the practical danger that the contribution of social intelligence may be underestimated when considered as a subset of the knowledge domains or skills sets of human cognition. To counter this practical development problem, the concept of the social intelligence interface is introduced as a developmental construct to inform the inclusive design process.

In this paper, we present an exploratory study of the web navigation experiences of dyslexic users. Findings indicate that dyslexics exhibit distinctive web navigation behaviour and preferences. We believe that the outcomes of this study add to our understanding of the particular needs of this web user population and have implications for the design of effective navigation structures.

This paper describes a study conducted to develop a set of interface design principles and guidelines that can be used to develop and improve universal access systems for the visually impaired, such as Haptic Audio Virtual Environments (HAVEs). Over the last few decades, user interface systems have advanced to allowing users to interact with computational systems physically, perceptively, and conceptually. However, this process has also left blind and partially blind users unable to access such new technologies. It is also true that there are currently only limited methods for presenting information non-visually and these do not provide an equivalent speed and ease of use to their graphical counterparts. Comprehensible design principles and guidelines addressing the needs of blind users should be helpful when developing universal access systems, such as haptic audio virtual environments that use multiple sensory modalities to present information.

In 1980, World Health Organization defined handicap as a condition of disadvantage. Instead, since 2001, WHO considers handicap as a form of diversity, embedded in a society where anybody is diverse in his/her own way. This change in definition signals a cultural transformation both in the society at large and in its part that is composed by the “handicapped” people. Such a change in the attitudes is rooted in the fact that the assistive technologies let people to overcome limitations and allow to build an intelligent ambient that permits all to exploit their diverse potentialities. In Italy, this process of social change has been accompanied, for more than twenty years, by a Foundation (ASPHI), whose mission has been to favour the education and the inclusion in the labour market of people with disability through the use, at the beginning, of the computer-based, and, then, of the communication technologies. In the following contribution, the main characteristics, and activities, and the evolution processes of ASPHI will be presented, together with the outcomes of a survey on how the process of cultural transformation has taken place. The survey was conducted on a sample of the people that directly (they have attended course in ASPHI) or indirectly (they at least once asked ASPHI for information or help) had to do with 6h9s Foundation. The quantitative and qualitative information show a clear shift in the self-perception of “people with disability” from exclusion to inclusion, from the limitations of the handicap to the value of diversity.