The European project GUIDE ("Gentle user interfaces for elderly people") developed a software framework and design tools which allows developers to efficiently integrate accessibility and personalisation features into their applications, minimizing intervention with existing development process and tools.
My contribution was to develop the User Interface Representation Extraction Component (UIREC) which is a tool developed in order to infer the abstract user interface (in this case described in UIML) from TV based applications (HTML and CSS).
GUIDE used multimodal and adaptation features to help the interaction with the TV by users with certain disabilities. It was possible to use speech commands, gestures and a gyroscopic remote control.
The ESCAPE project aimed to improve the social skills of autistic children by developing a story telling tool for therapists. This tool is aimed to be used in the therapist sessions with the children where they learn social gestures and mimic those gestures.
My contribution was to develop a gesture classifier and recognizer using the Kinect device to capture
the children movements.
Recently, I was involved in the implementation of a framework for Accessibility evaluation of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) including TV based applications. Specifically, I helped on the enhancement of the QualWeb Evaluation framework, giving it the ability to navigate through the interactive elements of the application simulating the user interaction for automated evaluation. Thus, we have a more complete evaluation, as it is performed over all the possible states of the application.
MY LATEST PROJECTS
Currently, I am working on A4TV, a project related with the acessibility of TV platforms, specifically with TV based applications for connected TVs.
In today's culture, television is still a central part of people’s life. Like everyone else, blind and partially sighted persons want to watch TV and be part of the trend. In the past, the strategies of the visually impaired consisted of a combination of residual sight, hearing and audio description (AD) to understand content. It can be argued that this was sufficient, as the communication was mainly unidirectional. Nowadays, Connected TV platforms extend the reach of multimedia content by enabling access both to the broadcast of digital content and to multimedia content available on the internet, including video-on-demand, games, social networks and much more. These platforms, together with the delivery of multimedia content to the home user via the Internet, are becoming increasingly frequent, with major brands such as Apple, Google and Samsung investing in this field. However, with the plethora of on-screen information and interactivity they offer, TVs have become less accessible.
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The overall goal of this PhD proposal reported herein is to improve the accessibility of TV platforms, putting special emphasis on visually impaired people, as we foresee an increase of the use of Connected TV platforms.