Enabling user interface developers to experience accessibility limitations through visual,hearing, physical and cognitive impairment simulation

His paper presents a tool facilitating developers of user interfaces (UIs) to experience accessibility limitations that can be posed from various disabilities during the interaction of impaired users with their developments. In this respect, various aspects of visual, hearing, physical and cognitive impairments have been modelled through filters providing approximate, yet, realistic simulations over them. These filters have formed the basis for the developed tool, which can be used either on its own (as a standalone application), or be embedded in the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment. The tool, named DIAS, allows for impairment simulations to be performed over Java, mobile and web applications. Moreover, it integrates two of the most common assistive technologies (ATs), namely a screen reader and a magnifier. As a result, developers of UIs can not only experience how interaction would be affected from various impairments, but they can also understand how their developments would be perceived by impaired users through an AT. This work aims to provide an integrated, practical solution for impairment simulation, which could be easily adopted by developers, thus realistically increasing the possibilities for the future development of interactive applications that are more accessible to users with disabilities.     

Smart Workplaces for older adults: coping ‘ethically’ with technology pervasiveness

Universal Access in the Information Society - Pervasive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and the Internet of Things, despite their great potential for improved...     

A knowledge-based approach to user interface adaptation from preferences and for special needs

Moving between devices is omnipresent, but not for people with disabilities or those who require specific accessibility options. Setting up assistive technologies or finding settings to overcome a certain barrier can be a demanding task for people without technical skills. Context-sensitive adaptive user interfaces are advancing, although migrating access features from one device to another is very rarely addressed. In this paper, we describe the knowledge-based component of the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure that infers how a device shall be best configured at the operating system layer, the application layer and the web layer to meet the requirements of a user including possible special needs or disabilities. In this regard, a mechanism to detect and resolve conflicting accessibility policies as well as recommending preference substitutes is a main requirement, as elaborated in this paper. As the proposed system emulates decision-making of accessibility experts, we validated the automatic deduced configurations against manual configurations of ten accessibility experts. The assessment result shows that the average matching score of the developed system is high. Thus, the proposed system can be considered capable of making precise decisions towards personalizing user interfaces based on user needs and preferences.     

Introducing web service accessibility assessment techniques through a unified quality of service context

This paper introduces novel web service (WS) accessibility assessment techniques through a unified Quality of Services (QoS) context. The goal is to enable future QoS-aware service selection systems to select and provide accessible web services, ones that are properly designed so as to allow their consumption from end-user applications, used from people with disabilities. In this line, a WS accessibility assessment Framework (WSaaF) has been developed, on the basis of WS accessibility guidelines, dealing with accessibility issues that can appear both on the presentation level of content delivered through WSs and on the content level itself. The WSaaF and its guidelines follow the rationale behind W3C WCAG 2.0-based accessibility standardization of web content. It provides the basis toward building future accessible WSs, a task that can be further facilitated by the use of an appropriate Tool (WSaaT), developed with the aim to provide automatic assessment of services, against guidelines of the proposed framework. Then, the WS accessibility attribute is introduced, as a metric that can be used in conjunction to ones typically utilized so far, within QoS-aware service selection systems. As a result, a novel unified QoS framework is proposed, incorporating the notion of accessibility in the service selection process. The proposed unified QoS framework can eventually lead to the provision of services, which are selected from appropriate repositories and better suit the special needs of people with disabilities.     

An integrated semantic framework supporting universal accessibility to ICT

As we are moving rapidly to a digital economy, accessing and effectively using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in everyday life is widely recognized as an important requirement. However, the accessibility technologies that we have up to date are meeting the needs of only some, at a very high cost and, as a consequence, accessible ICT for all people still remains a major research and development goal. This work presents an integrated ontological framework for the semantic representation of terms and concepts (i.e., related to user needs and preferences (N&P) with respect to ICT use, as well as solutions, platforms and devices) that are required for addressing the universal accessibility in the scope of the Cloud4all project and the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII). Cloud4all aims at advancing and building upon the concept of GPII through the development of the necessary tools and models for making ICT accessible for all by exploiting the cloud computing paradigm. The main goal of the proposed framework lays in the separation between generalized accessibility concepts, user interaction mechanisms and N&P with the particular details of different ICT artifacts. Thus, the framework aims at integrating concepts related with user N&P, as well as ICT solutions, platforms, devices and their customizable settings along with information concerning their vendors or implementers, in order to (a) offer the necessary expressiveness for defining/representing personal N&P across applications, platforms and devices, (b) link N&P with the conditions/context according to which these shall be applicable for (e.g., considering the user activity and the physical environment), (c) link interaction requirements (originated from user characteristics) with N&P and (d) support the Cloud4all matchmaking process through the mapping between N&P and application-specific settings based on semantic rules and automatic reasoning techniques.     

Radiation Characteristics and Mutual Coupling of a Dual: Band Antenna Array Structure

In this paper, an antenna array structure consisting of a reflector plate and a number of printed dipole radiation elements is investigated. This antenna array implementation is suitable for the globally available 2.4 and 5?GHz ISM frequency band facilitating a variety of wireless applications. S-parameters and radiation characteristics are simulated and measured in details. The impact of the plane reflector on radiation patterns and the reflection coefficient are also investigated. Furthermore, mutual coupling effects between adjacent elements and the corresponding radiation patterns are studied for different antenna array configurations. Both simulated and measurement results are useful in antenna array design and antenna applications in wireless communications.     

A RAkEL-based methodology to estimate software vulnerability characteristics & score - an application to EU project ECHO

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Software vulnerabilities constitute a critical threat for cybersecurity analysts in the contemporary society, since the successfully exploited vulnerabilities...     

SIMO channel performance evaluation on indoor environment at 2.4 GHz

This work presents an experimental study of single-input multiple-output (SIMO) channel performance in the indoor radio propagation environment. Indoor channel measurements at the 2.4-GHz ISM frequency band have been conducted using a versatile channel sounder test-bed platform. A single transmitting antenna, four receiving antennas with two proposed geometries and a four-branch receiver circuitry were used in order to achieve channel sounder measurements exploiting baseband signal-processing techniques. In-depth investigation of SIMO wireless channel performance was realised through three types of metrics: signal strength, gain coefficient and capacity. Performance results indicate SIMO channel capacity enhancement and illustrate differences between the two proposed geometries.     

A hybrid matchmaking approach in the ambient assisted living domain

During the recent years, several new Information and Communication Technology solutions have been developed in order to meet the increasing needs of elderly with cognitive impairments and support their autonomous living. Most of these solutions follow a human-centred paradigm that aims to provide users with personalised services according to their needs by also ensuring their safety with mechanisms that can automatically trigger appropriate actions in situations where there may be a risk for an elderly. The present paper presents a hybrid matchmaking approach that uses efficiently both a rule-based and a statistical matchmaker in order to (a) propose ambient assisted living services to the end-users, based on their role, status and context of use and (b) identify and resolve problematic cases by automatically selecting the most proper set of services to be called in a single or combined manner.