After three months as a visiting research fellow, Cristina González Cachón has finished her research activity at the University of Manchester. The project called TEOA, Text Entry for Older Adults, was about studying the feasibility of moving prototypical user input error correction technology previously deployed in RIAM project to the MyMobileWeb platform.
A final report about this study has been made concluding that it is not so trivial moving this technology, and a deeply research is needed. To start this research, we have moved the UsaProxy stuff previously used at RIAM project (Usability proxy for websites) to the MyMobileWeb platform. It logs all the events that have been done over the web application to analyse the interaction between users and devices. A MyMobileWeb application has been built to test the logging-event stuff.
In the next months, some tests will be carried out over the use case described below and a final report will be written summarizing all the conclusions that could be extracted from them.
WEL and the
School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work are pleased to announce the success of the EPSRC Windfall grant, ‘Online Social Support for Lung Cancer Patients’. The project, running in partnership with
Intel and
Finerday, will be investigating the feasibility of providing low cost, personalised social and healthcare support to people with lung cancer.
The Web Ergonomics Lab wishes all of you a great year ahead – Happy new year and happy holidays.
The Web Ergonomics Lab wishes all of you a Merry Christmas and happy holidays.
A paper describing some of the key findings of the SASWAT project has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Human Computer Studies, and was recently made available online. The paper, titled ‘Tailored presentation of dynamic Web content for audio browsers’, describes how studies of how sighted users interacted with dynamic content were used to inform rules for presentation of this content to screen reader users. The abstract is as follows:
Understanding the content of a Web page and navigating within and between pages are crucial tasks for any Web user. To those who are accessing pages through non-visual means, such as screen readers, the challenges offered by these tasks are not easily overcome, even when pages are unchanging documents. The advent of ‘Web 2.0′ and Web applications, however, means that documents often are not static, but update, either automatically or due to user interaction. This development poses a difficult question for screen reader designers: how should users be notified of page changes? In this article we introduce rules for presenting such updates, derived from studies of how sighted users interact with them. An implementation of the rules has been evaluated, showing that users who were blind or visually impaired found updates easier to deal with than the relatively quiet way in which current screen readers often present them.
The
iKUP browser http://www.kupkb.org/ allows users to browse and query the Kidney and Urinary Pathway Knowledge Base (KUPKB), a collection of omics datasets that have been extracted from scientific publications and other related renal databases. The browser was developed by the
BioHealth and Informatics Group (BHIG) at the
University of Manchester, as part of the EU-FP7
e-LICO project.
WEL is working with BHIG to evaluate iKUP, analysing interaction data logged during real-world usage to understand and improve the user experience.
The Web Ergonomics lab is collaborating with the
School of Computer and Security Science of the
Edith Cowan University in Perth (Western Australia) in a research project on accessibility testing tools benchmarking.
Markel Vigo was hosted in Perth by Dr Justin Brown and Vivienne Conway for the kicking-off of the project.
The
COPE project started on January 2011. The context of the project is mainly set on adaptive human behaviour and specifically on disruptive strategies. Its main goal consists of intercepting coping strategies employed by users while interacting in the Web so that interventions on the interface can ameliorate their experience. Two initial deliverables have already been produced:
Cristina González Cachón is a researcher from the R&D Department of
Fundación CTIC. She is specifically focused on the Mobile Web field in the Unit of Device Independence and Mobility. She is going to work in collaboration with the Web Ergonomics Lab as a Visiting Research Fellow for 3 months, from September to December; in order to study user experience in close-to-real-world simulated typical situations by using the MyMobileWeb framework.
A paper by WEL member Andy Brown, in collaboration with Robert Stevens and Steve Pettifer has been accepted for publication in Human-Computer Interaction. The paper arises from Andy’s PhD research, and explores the issues involved with exploring node-arc diagrams (graphs) non-visually. In particular, it discusses how automatic analysis and annotation of graphs, before and during exploration, can alleviate some of the problems associated with exploring through sound and replicate some of the benefits that diagrammatic presentation offers sighted users.
The abstract is as follows:
Non-linear forms of diagrammatic presentation, such as node-arc graphs, are a powerful and elegant means of visual information presentation. While providing non-visual access is now routine for many forms of linear information, it becomes more difficult as the structure of the information becomes increasingly non-linear. An understanding of the ways in which graphs benefit sighted people, based on experiments and the literature, together with the difficulties encountered when exploring graphs non-visually, helps form a solution for non-visual access to graphs. This paper proposes that differing types of annotation offer a powerful and flexible technique for transferring the benefits of graph based diagrams, as well as for reducing disorientation while moving around the graph and for tackling some of the inherent disadvantages of using sound. Different forms of annotation that may address these problems are explored, classified and evaluated, including notes designed to summarise and to aid node differentiation. Graph annotation may be performed automatically, creating a graph that evaluation shows requires less mental effort to explore, and on which tasks can be achieved more effectively and more efficiently.
The date of publication is not yet known, although the full thesis is available from our repository.