On 26th August and 15th October, members of the Web Ergonomics Lab traveled to Crossacres to work with Silver Service from Age Concern. The event allowed people who wre new to computers, or just interested in technology, to take part in user studies for the SCWeb2 project. The studies were conducted in a relaxed atmosphere where tea and coffee was served. The lab gained a lot of information from the visits and our equipment, in particular the eye-tracker, was a huge talking point amongst the members.

We would like to thank our partners at Crossacres, especially Jack Puller, for their help in organising a successful event and look forward to future visits to the centre.

Throughout April, the HCW Laboratory team will be conducting experiments, with both art experts and the general public, to gain an understanding of the sequence in which sighted users focus on areas of a visual resource. Eye-tracking technology will be used to investigate visual sequencing in different kinds of art work and to analyse how an individual’s visual attention is allocated during a task. Eye-tracking technologies can detect the sequence in which the eyes gaze on specific areas and can record the number of fixations an area receives.

By looking for similarities and patterns in the way that sighted individuals focus on visual resources within works of art, the HCW Laboratory team hope to be able to more accurately predict a user’s path through visual resources such as web pages. These predictions can then be used to determine the order in which information should be provided to non-sighted users. It is hoped, therefore, that the research findings will inform the development of technology that offer blind, visually disabled, or mobile device users an improved experience the World Wide Web.

A video presented shows clips from the HCW Lab team experiments using Eye-tracking technology, held at the Manchester City Art Gallery.

The Red dot indicates sighted users gaze movements over the painting in real time and the heat map shows the combined data from different viewers.

The first set of results from research funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) indicates that many able-bodied people make the same errors – and with similar frequencies – when typing and ‘mousing’ on mobile phones, as physically impaired users of desktop computers.

According to researchers in the School of Computer Science working on the RIAM (Reciprocal Interoperability between Accessible and Mobile Webs) project, mobile owners press the wrong key and press the same key repeatedly by mistake. They also found mobile users tend to click the wrong area of the screen, click the screen multiple times in error, and make mistakes when trying to drag and drop information.

“These types of errors have been a big problem for physically impaired users for a long time,” said Dr Yeliz Yesilada, a senior researcher on the project. “But solutions have been developed for all of these problems in the form of small assistive computer programmes, which supplement Windows and Mac operating systems.”

For the study, researchers at Manchester re-analysed earlier work by scientists at the University of Edinburgh who had looked into the problems of physically disabled users. They then re-ran the experiments with mobile users and found that a significant correlation existed between the two user groups.

“In recent years solutions have been built to help disabled users and it is hoped these solutions can now be applied for the benefit of mobile phone users,” said fellow researcher Tianyi Chen. “By using solutions developed for disabled users we can help handset manufacturers, such as Nokia and Sony, to reduce the time we all spend correcting errors on our mobiles.” “Software already developed for PC users with disabilities could automatically correct erroneous commands and help reduce those annoying times when you accidentally cancel a text message or call someone by sitting on your phone.”

The two-year RIAM project is supported by £205,000 funding from the EPSRC. The technical report on the research can be downloaded from http://hcw-eprints.cs.man.ac.uk/51/.

Procedure

This experiment consists of three sessions:

1. The first is the background session. In this session you will be asked a few questions about your previous experience on using mobile phones and PDAs.
2. Next is the main session. Here we will present you a PDA and a set of tasks. The tasks cover the basic input activities, such as typing, pointing, clicking and dragging. You will need to conduct those tasks on an experiment Web site loaded from the PDA.
3. The last is the feedback session, in which you will be asked to give feedbacks about the tasks you have just done. For example, you will be asked “how difficult do you find clicking with a stylus?”

The experiment will last from 30 minutes to more than 1 hour, depending on your performance. Note that we are not testing you personally, so there is no right or wrong thing to do. Also note that for our future analysis, the whole experiment will be video recorded, provided you are comfortable with this.

Contact

To take part, please contact Tianyi Chen or Dr. Yeliz Yesilada:

Procedure

This experiment consists of three parts:

1. During the first part, you will be asked to answer some demographic questions (such as gender and age range).
2. In the second part, you will look at a set of Web pages in image version and be asked to rank them with respect to their visual complexity. You will look at each image page for 7 seconds and then the page will automatically change to the question page. On the question page you will be asked to provide a score for the visual complexity of the page on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being very visually simple and 10 being very visually complex. You will also be asked to answer a set of questions for the feel and look of the page. If you do not remember the look and feel of the page, please try to answer with your first impression.
3. In the third part, we will ask you some feedback questions that will reflect your opinions regarding the experiment’s tasks.

Please note that there are no right or wrong answers; the answers reflect your opinion and first impressions of the Web page’s image only. Any information that you provide will be confidential. You do not need to identify yourself by name on any question and you may quit the survey anytime by closing the browser. The survey will take no longer than 25 minutes.

How to take part

To take part, please visit:
http://hcw.cs.manchester.ac.uk/research/vicram/studies/ranking/ranking.pl

Contact

For more information, please contact:

The Evaluation Procedure

Participants will be invited into the School of Computer Science to take part in the experiment, that shall take no longer than 30 minutes to complete. During the evaluation, you will be asked to perform a series of tasks that involve finding information within a Web page, for example “What is the headline of the news story?” For each page, we would like you to browse the page using the screen reader in your usual manner. When you believe you have found the answer to the question, tell the evaluator who will then move onto the next task.

This project has been approved by the Senate Committee on the Ethics of Research on Human Beings (study reference number 07056).

Participants

We are seeking participants who are visually impaired and use screen-reader technology to access Web content. Participants must be able to bring their own equipment into the Human Centred Web Lab. Experience of using computers and browsing the Web is desirable. We welcome volunteers from all age ranges; both male and female.

Contact

If you wish to participate or require further information, please contact:

Postal Address:

School of Computer Science,
Kilburn Building Room LF1,
Oxford Road,
Manchester,
M13 9PL,
UK

International Telephone:

+44 (0) 161 275 6239

Email:

darren.lunn-AT-cs.manchester.ac.uk