Universal Access Theoretical Perspectives Practice And Experience

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 7th ERCIM Workshop on User Interfaces for All, held in Paris, France, in October 2002. The 40 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected during two rounds of refereeing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on user interfaces for all: accessibility issues, user interfaces for all: design and assessment, towards an information society for all, novel interaction paradigms: new modalities and dialogue style, novel interaction paradigms: accessibility issues, and mobile computing: design and evaluation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs, ICCHP 2006, held in Linz, Austria, in July 2006. The 193 revised contributions presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers evaluate how various fields in computer science can contribute to helping people with various kinds of disabilities and impairment.

The 8th ERCIM Workshop “User Interfaces for All” was held in Vienna, Austria, on 28–29 June 2004, building upon the results of the seven previous workshops held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, 30–31 October 1995; Prague, Czech Republic, 7–8 Nov- ber 1996; Obernai, France, 3–4 November 1997; Stockholm, Sweden, 19–21 October 1998; Dagstuhl, Germany, 28 November – 1 December 1999; Florence, Italy, 25–26 October 2000; and Paris (Chantilly), France, 24–25 October 2002. The concept of “User Interfaces for All” targets a proactive realization of the “- signforall”principleinthe?eldofhuman-computerinteraction(HCI),andinvolvesthe developmentof user interfaces to interactiveapplicationsand e-services, which provide universalaccess andusabilityto potentiallyall users. In thetraditionofits predecessors, the 8th ERCIM Workshop “User Interfaces for All” aimed to consolidate recent work and to stimulate further discussion on the state of the art in “User Interfaces for All” and its increasing range of applications in the upcoming Information Society. The emphasis of the 2004 event was on “User-Centered Interaction Paradigms for Universal Access in the Information Society. ” The requirement for user-centered u- versal access stems from the growing impact of the fusion of the emerging techno- gies and from the different dimensions of diversity that are intrinsic to the Information Society. These dimensions become evident when considering the broad range of user characteristics, the changing nature of human activities, the variety of contexts of use, the increasing availability and diversi?cation of information, knowledge sources and e-services, the proliferation of technological platforms, etc.

In recent years, the field of Universal Access has made significant progress in consolidating theoretical approaches, scientific methods and technologies, as well as in exploring new application domains. Increasingly, professionals in this rapidly maturing area require a comprehensive and multidisciplinary resource that addresses current principles

TheInternationalConferenceTSD 2005,the8theventin theseriesonText,Speech,and Dialogue, which originated in 1998, presented state-of-the-art technology and recent achievements in the ?eld of natural language processing. It declared its intent to be an interdisciplinary forum, intertwining research in speech and language processing with its applications in everyday practice. We feel that the mixture of different approaches and applications offered a great opportunity to get acquainted with the current act- ities in all aspects of language communication and to witness the amazing vitality of researchers from developing countries too. The ?nancial support of the ISCA (Inter- tional Speech Communication Association) enabled the wide attendance of researchers from all active regions of the world. Thisyear’sconferencewaspartiallyorientedtowardsmulti-modalhuman-computer interaction (HCI), which can be seen as the most attractive topic of HCI at the present time. In this way, we are involved in a rich complex of communicative activity, facial expressions, hand gestures, direction of gaze, to name but the most obvious ones. The interpretationof each user utterancedependson the context,prosody,facial expressions (e. g. brows raised, brows and gaze both raised) and gestures. Hearers have to adapt to the speaker (e. g. maintainingthe theme of the conversation,smiling etc. ). Research into the interaction of these channels is however limited, often focusing on the interaction between a pair of channels. Six signi?cant scienti?c results achieved in this area in the USA, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands, and the Czech Republic were presented by keynote speakers in special plenary sessions. Further, approx.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 7th ERCIM Workshop on User Interfaces for All, held in Paris, France, in October 2002. The 40 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected during two rounds of refereeing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on user interfaces for all: accessibility issues, user interfaces for all: design and assessment, towards an information society for all, novel interaction paradigms: new modalities and dialogue style, novel interaction paradigms: accessibility issues, and mobile computing: design and evaluation.

The Information Society is bringing about radical changes in the way people work and interact with each other and with information. In contrast to previous information processing paradigms, where the vast majority of computer-mediated tasks were business-oriented and executed by office workers using the personal computer in its various forms (i. e. , initially alphanumeric terminals and later on graphical user interfaces), the Information Society signifies a growth not only in the range and scope of the tasks, but also in the way in which they are carried out and experienced. To address the resulting dimensions of diversity, the notion of universal access is critically important. Universal access implies the accessibility and usability of Information Society technologies by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Universal access aims to enable equitable access and active participation of potentially all citizens in existing and emerging computer-mediated human activities by developing universally accessible and usable products and services, which are capable of accommodating individual user requirements in different contexts of use and independently of location, target machine, or run-time environment. In the context of the emerging Information Society, universal access becomes predominantly an issue of design, pointing to the compelling need for devising systematic and cost-effective approaches to designing systems that accommodate the requirements of the widest possible range of end-users. Recent developments have emphasized the need to consolidate progress by means of establishing a common vocabulary and a code of design practice, which addresses the specific challenges posed by universal access.

The four-volume set LNCS 6765-6768 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, UAHCI 2011, held as Part of HCI International 2011, in Orlando, FL, USA, in July 2011, jointly with 10 other conferences addressing the latest research and development efforts and highlighting the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The 57 revised papers included in the first volume were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: design for all methods and tools; Web accessibility: approaches, methods and tools; multimodality, adaptation and personlization; and eInclusion policy, good practice, legislation and security issues.