Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Intensive care is often a stressful experience for patients and presents unique challenges for the nursing staff. Under conditions where patients are unable to speak (e.g. mechanical breathing, intubation) it becomes difficult for nurses to be aware of patients needs. We have developed two multimedia software programs that are designed to assist patient/nurse communication in these situations.

EASTIN (European Assistive Technology Information Network) is a trans-national information service on Assistive Technologies for people with disabilities, that aggregates the contents of six national information systems in Italy (Portale SIVA), Germany (Rehadat), Denmark (HMI Basen), the United Kingdom (DLF Data), The Netherlands (Hulpmiddelenwijzer) and Spain (Catálogo de Ayudas Técnicas). It is the result of the EASTIN project, carried out in 2004-2005 with partial funding by the EU within the programme. In order to work as a network, the six national systems have been according to commonly agreed standards and through the new . This is equipped with advanced search engines able to perform search and retrieval operations across all the partners’ databases, in any of the partners’ languages.

The frequently prescribed “Design for All” or “Universal Design” reduces the comprehension of participation of people with disabilities and their interests in technical development tendentious to a pure user involvement. In such case, the ethical implications of new technologies are not considered. In this article we develop a concept for participation that will be more than a pure user involvement. To this purpose, ways to participation from the viewpoint of Disability Studies as well as Technology Assessment will be combined. The Participatory Action Research, which is suggested as methodical approach to technological development process will also be embedded in this concept for participation.

An educational resource targeting children with learning difficulties should be based on special teaching aids to achieve its educational purposes. Teaching supported by new technologies should guarantee the accessibility of the contents introduced over the web, as well as through the use of software applications. In this paper, we present a methodology for creating such resources and its application to the Proyecto Aprender (Learn Project). This project involves developing an accessible web site targeting teachers and the public (parents, families, researchers...) generally, and developing an accessible application targeting learners in particular. The whole process of design, preparation and construction is conceived to meet learners’ special educational needs.

The IMS Global Learning Consortium developed the QTI (Question and Test Interoperability) specification to allow the exchange of question and test data, and their corresponding result reports, between learning systems. QTI 1.2 had some accessibility issues, as the VISUAL project discovered when transforming QTI tests into accessible HTML and voice user interfaces. Some problems were due to an insufficient mechanism to specify alternative text, other problems were due to the ambiguity of the intent of certain interaction types. QTI 2.0 solved the issue of alternative text, but the ambiguity with regard to the intent of interaction types was not sufficiently addressed.

People with Specific Needs – even if they are, in principle, willing and capable of taking part in ‘our’ information – or better ICT – society – run the risk of unemployment and (social) exclusion significantly more often than people without disability. While recognized certification schemes, like the internationally recognised and promoted IT certificate ECDL help to clearly prove ones knowledge in handling mainstream IT and open up the labour market, those certificates build up new and insuperable barriers for people with specific needs when not designed and implemented accessible. Following the outcomes of the previously presented EU funded project ECDL PD, primarily accessible inclusive training settings are lacking. To overcome this obstacle, the Austrian project ECDL bf (ECDL without barriers) worked on an extensively accessible ECDL e-learning solution applicable for the mainstream market that will be presented in this paper.

The talking-head telephone, Synface, is a lip-reading support for people with hearing-impairment. It has been tested by 49 users with varying degrees of hearing-impaired in UK and Sweden in lab and home environments. Synface was found to give support to the users, especially in perceiving numbers and addresses and an enjoyable way to communicate. A majority deemed Synface to be a useful product.

High speed connections have enabled video-based communication and given deaf and hard-of-hearing people the opportunity to rely on the visual modality to better communicate with each other and with hearing people. However a number of obstacles still have to be removed to make this technology really accessible for all: technical expertise for operating a computer, lack of compatibility, poorly integrated services,... This papers describes an ongoing project for providing a better accessibility by (1) supporting multiple kind of user terminals (such as PC, videophone, TV, mobile phone) in an interoperable way; (2) with a simple and user friendly interface, (3) giving access to a number of related services such as directories, video message box, relay centre and signed news.

The Spanish Sign Language Dictionary (DILSE) is one of the first truly bilingual (Spanish Sign Language-Spanish) electronic dictionaries for the deaf community. The properties of this format are perfectly matched to a visual language such as sign language, which uses space as a means of expression. Additionally, two-way searches for word entries are possible from either Spanish or signs. The signs have been previously classified according to sign language-based linguistic criteria. Furthermore, the system presented here includes different geographical varieties of Spanish Sign Language.

To make sign language animation used as instructions for stomach X-ray examination easier for hearing impaired patients to understand, the authors identified problems in currently used sign animation and then created a new animation to solve these problems. The objective of this study was to compare how easy to understand the new animation was over previous animation by conducting evaluation tests. The evaluation tests were conducted with 32 hearing impaired persons. Results indicated that the new animation improved comprehension approximately 8% over previous animation.