A paper by WEL members Alex Qiang Chen, Simon Harper, Darren Lunn and Andrew Brown, describing a high-level approach to access and interact with Web widgets of the WIMWAT project has been accepted for publication in the World Wide Web journal, and was recently made available online (DOI: 10.1007/s11280-012-0156-6). The paper, titled ‘Widget Identification: A High-Level Approach to Accessibility’, describes how Web widgets can be identified from the Web page’s source code. By identifying the widgets, users of the Web can be better informed about them, and it can assist developers to identify the different components of the widgets to insert WAI-ARIA tags. The abstract is as follows:

The Web 2.0 sees once static pages evolve into hybrid applications, and content that was previously simple, now becoming increasingly complicated due to the many updating components located throughout the page. While beneficial for some users, these components (widgets) are often complex and will lead to confusion and frustration for others, notably those for whom accessibility is already an issue. While users and developers often perceive widgets as complete components (a Slideshow, or an Auto Suggest List), they are in-fact heterogeneous collections of code, and are therefore hard to computationally identify. Identification is critical if we wish to reverse engineer inaccessible widgets or ‘inject’ missing ‘WAI-ARIA’ into ‘RIAs’. In this case, we introduce a technique that analyses the code associated with a Web page to identify widgets using combinations of code constructs, which enable uniquely identification. We go on to technically evaluate our approach with the most difficult widgets to distinguish between—Slideshows and Carousels—and then describe two prototype applications for visually impaired and older users by means of example.

1. We see our work as ‘Core HCI Research, Applied Across Disciplines’.
2. We are interested in how users interact with the Web and how the Web, through its design and technology, enables users to interact with it (including Emergence & Evolution).
3. We believe that by understanding difficult technical interactions in the context of user experience and dis- ability we are better placed to understand, and solve, the associated problems in everyone’s interactive behaviour.
4. We take disabled interaction as an uber use modality – if we address these hard problems universal solutions will follow.
5. We are small, focused, determined, very scientific, very empirical, in pursuit of (and achieving) core cross-disciplinary research excellence, and actively contributing to Manchester’s 35th world-wide rating for HCI (as formulated by Microsoft). Support from our 3rd sector funders shows the Big Society in action.

This statements were originally published on Simon Harper’s blog entry entitled HCI Capability in CompSci here at Manchester.

Download the slides (pdf).

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.

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.