Korean language math-to-speech rules for digital books for people with reading disabilities and their usability evaluation

The Journal of Supercomputing - Although Digital Accessible Information System, an international digital talking book standard, is conducting active research on upper level education for people...     

An autonomous vehicle for people with motor disabilities

The authors describe the creation of the VAHM prototype, including the hardware and software functionalities and other aspects of this “smart” wheelchair     

Developments in IT training for people with disabilities

This paper looks at three models of IT training for people with disabilities. These have been called the workshop, educational and systemic vocational rehabilitation models. A number of evaluations of facilities are reviewed, and good practice in each model is identified. The paper then goes on to discuss ways in which these aspects of good practice can be combined into a more comprehensive approach that caters for both IT training and work adjustment needs, is orientated towards real work, does not exclude provision of a service to those in greatest need, and offers help when people move from training into employment. The paper ends with a call for people from different backgrounds to continue to learn from each other, and argues that there is an urgent need for further research and development.     

Federal Web site accessibility for people with disabilities

The Americans with Disabilities Act requires organizations to provide physical access to people with disabilities. With the advent of the Web, federal legislation may extend into cyberspace. (The "Federal Support" sidebar highlights some relevant legislation.) How courts will apply ADA is still uncertain. Federal cases in which ADA has been applied to cyberspace are still under review at various court levels. On the state level, however, the New York State attorney general recently required Priceline and Ramada Inn to make their Web sites accessible and subject to independent accessibility audits. Other research has examined the accessibility of college and university, corporate, and retail Web sites relative to the ADA. The authors conducted a study on the accessibility of the Web sites of US government agencies and branches of the US government and their contractors, which, like university sites, are mandated to be accessible. They also attempt to determine the types of accessibility barriers that occur most frequently on these sites. Because the study is preliminary, findings are basic estimates of accessibility; you should not construe them as statistically representative of all sites offered. However, our findings on accessibility barriers can serve as a guideline to Web designers seeking to create sites that effectively communicate their contents to people with disabilities.     

Developments in IT training for people with disabilities

Abstract

This paper looks at three models of IT training for people with disabilities. These have been called the workshop, educational and systemic vocational rehabilitation models. A number of evaluations of facilities are reviewed, and good practice in each model is identified. The paper then goes on to discuss ways in which these aspects of good practice can be combined into a more comprehensive approach that caters for both IT training and work adjustment needs, is orientated towards real work, does not exclude provision of a service to those in greatest need, and offers help when people move from training into employment. The paper ends with a call for people from different backgrounds to continue to learn from each other, and argues that there is an urgent need for further research and development.     

Head mouse control system for people with disabilities

In this paper, a human–machine interface for disabled people with spinal cord injuries is proposed. The designed human–machine interface is an assistive system that uses head movements and blinking for mouse control. In the proposed system, by moving one's head, the user moves the mouse pointer to the required coordinates and then blinks to send commands. The considered head mouse control is based on image processing including facial recognition, in particular, the recognition of the eyes, mouth, and nose. The proposed recognition system is based on the convolutional neural network, which uses the low-quality images that are captured by a computer's camera. The convolutional neural network (CNN) includes convolutional layers, a pooling layer, and a fully connected network. The CNN transforms the head movements to the actual coordinates of the mouse. The designed system allows people with disabilities to control a mouse pointer with head movements and to control mouse buttons with blinks. The results of the experiments demonstrate that this system is robust and accurate. This invention allows people with disabilities to freely control mouse cursors and mouse buttons without wearing any equipment.     

Accessible presentation of information for people with visual disabilities

Personal computers, palm top computers, media players and cell phones provide instant access to information from around the world. There are a wide variety of options available to make that information available to people with visual disabilities, so many that choosing one for use in any given context can often feel daunting to someone new to the field of accessibility. This paper reviews tools and techniques for the presentation of textual, graphic, mathematic and web documents through audio and haptic modalities to people with visual disabilities.     

Microstrip multiplexer with four channels for broadband system applications

A microstrip multiplexer for broadband system applications from 10 to 21 GHz has been developed. The multiplexer consists of four microstrip bandpass filters with center passband frequencies at 10, 12, 19, and 21 GHz. The multiplexer efficiently suppresses the parasitic passbands of the 10‐ and 12‐GHz filters and balances the phase relationship among the multiplexer channels. A method for improving the parasitic passband rejection has been devised. Measured results show that parasitic passband rejection is more than 38 dB. Measured insertion losses are 1.81, 1.90, 2.88, and 2.51 dB at 10.3, 12.25, 19.4, and 21.285 GHz, respectively. Measured out‐of‐band isolation is more than 32 dB at all these frequencies. This multiplexer has applications in communication transceiver systems with dual‐channel receiver (12 and 21 GHz) and dual‐channel transmitter (10 and 19 GHz). © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 11: 48–54, 2001.     

Performance evaluation of an intelligent CAC and routing framework for multimedia applications in broadband networks

In order to support multimedia communication, it is necessary to develop routing algorithms which use for routing more than one QoS parameters. This is because new services such as video on demand and remote meeting systems require better QoS. Also, for the Call Admission Control (CAC) of multimedia applications different QoS parameters should be considered. In our previous work, we proposed an intelligent routing and CAC strategy using cooperative agents. However, we only considered the time delay for the routing. The QoS and Congestion Control (CC) parameters were considered as indicators of QoS satisfication and congestion. In this work, we extend our previous work by proposing and implementing new algorithms based on Fuzzy Logic (FL) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) which use for CAC and routing many QoS parameters. The simulation results show that proposed framework has a good performance and is a promising method for QoS routing and CAC decision.     

Development and evaluation of a scale for measuring practitioners' attitudes toward computer applications

This paper describes the development and evaluation of a scale designed to measure practitioners' general attitudes toward clinical computer applications — the Practitioners' Attitudes Toward Computer Applications Scale (PATCAS). The PATCAS contains 35 items linked to seven structural variables. Results of a study of 227 practicing psychologists indicated that the PATCAS showed several desirable properties. Internal consistency was satisfactory for the seven PATCAS scales and excellent for the total score, and intercorrelations among the seven scales were moderately high. In terms of validity, the PATCAS was found to be related to several measures of computer use. Finally, scores on the PATCAS were found to be related to practitioner characteristics including sex (men's attitudes toward computers were generally more favorable than women's), theoretical orientation, and work setting. Suggestions are made for appropriate applications of the PATCAS.     

Anthropometry of elderly people in the Netherlands; research and applications

In order to fill the need for useful ergonomic data on elderly people, an anthropometric investigation has been conducted in several old people's homes in The Hague, the Netherlands. Twenty-five functional body dimensions of 822 elderly people were measured using methods based on international standards. The results have been used to compile a set of ergonomic recommendations and are being implemented in an existing CAD-model called ADAPS. This paper presents and discusses the findings of the investigation, and compares them with the English results from Loughborough and with the German DIN 33402. The mean value and standard deviation of unshod stature and weight were 157.1 cm (8.9 cm) and 63.7 kg (14 kg) respectively for 197 male and 625 female elderly. For the male sample, these values were 165.6 cm (8.2 cm) and 67.3 kg (13 kg); and for the female sample, they were 154.3 cm (7.2 cm) and 62.6 kg (14 kg), respectively. There were no large differences from published figures from the UK and Germany, but there are with figures on younger people.     

Novel broadband asymptotic waveform evaluation method and its applications in parameter extraction

A new technique to estimate the effective bandwidth of the asymptotic waveform evaluation (AWE) method is proposed, which guarantees the reliable application of AWE in a certain region. Furthermore, based on the effective bandwidth estimation, we develop a novel broadband AWE method, which is an extension and improvement of the conventional AWE method. The new method selects the multiple expansion points automatically by a simple compare algorithm and then implements the AWE process on every expansion point, thereby expanding the variable bandwidth of the AWE greatly. The variable here can be frequency, structure dimension, material parameter, etc. In the end, two examples of parameter extraction of microwave structures are given, which demonstrate that the new method has high efficiency and good accuracy in a broad band. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE, 2007.     

An overview of the Internet of Things for people with disabilities

Currently, over a billion people including children (or about 15% of the world's population) are estimated to be living with disability. The lack of support services can make handicapped people overly dependent on their families, which prevents them from being economically active and socially included. The Internet of Things can offer people with disabilities the assistance and support they need to achieve a good quality of life and allows them to participate in the social and economic life. In this paper, an overview of the Internet of Things for people with disabilities is provided. For this purpose, the proposed architecture of the Internet of Things is introduced. Different application scenarios are considered in order to illustrate the interaction of the components of the Internet of Things. Critical challenges have been identified and addressed.     

Crease detection from fingerprint images and its applications in elderly people

Conventional algorithms for fingerprint recognition are mainly based on minutiae information. But it is difficult to extract minutiae accurately and robustly for elderly people, and one of the main reasons is that there are many creases on the fingertips of elderly people. In this paper, we study on the detection of creases from fingerprint images, in which we treat the creases as a special kind of texture and design an optimal filter to extract them. We also study the applications of crease detection results to improve the performance of fingerprint recognition in elderly people, which include two aspects. First, it is used to remove the falsely detected minutiae. Second, the creases can be treated as a novel feature for elderly people's fingerprints, which is combined with minutiae feature to improve the performance. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of proposed methods.     

Boccia game simulator: Serious game adapted for people with disabilities

Integration in the world of sport is one way for individuals with disabilities or motor disorders to feel more socially integrated, independent, and confident. Boccia is a Paralympic sport, which is increasingly getting more attention around the world. These facts have contributed to the objectives of this work. Including it in the serious games category enables to develop and rehabilitate the cognitive capabilities. The main focus was BC3 classification athletes (users with limited motor characteristics that require the use of an assistive device—a ramp, in this case). This paper describes a realistic Boccia game simulator adapted for people with disabilities that integrates a set of features that includes real physics and social features. These features can be used to enhance the interest of nonpractitioners of the sport and to improve the training conditions. The official Boccia regulation was added to the design of the simulator. The usability and approximation to the reality of the simulator were tested and validated based on the tests performed and data collected via a survey of users with no motor or psychological disorders. Realism and usability rating was almost excellent, and good results were achieved at the assessment of the game experience.     

Potential of a modern vector supercomputer for practical applications: performance evaluation of SX-ACE

Achieving a high sustained simulation performance is the most important concern in the HPC community. To this end, many kinds of HPC system architectures have been proposed, and the diversity of the HPC systems grows rapidly. Under this circumstance, a vector-parallel supercomputer SX-ACE has been designed to achieve a high sustained performance of memory-intensive applications by providing a high memory bandwidth commensurate with its high computational capability. This paper examines the potential of the modern vector-parallel supercomputer through the performance evaluation of SX-ACE using practical engineering and scientific applications. To improve the sustained simulation performances of practical applications, SX-ACE adopts an advanced memory subsystem with several new architectural features. This paper discusses how these features, such as MSHR, a large on-chip memory, and novel vector processing mechanisms, are beneficial to achieve a high sustained performance for large-scale engineering and scientific simulations. Evaluation results clearly indicate that the high sustained memory performance per core enables the modern vector supercomputer to achieve outstanding performances that are unreachable by simply increasing the number of fine-grain scalar processor cores. This paper also discusses the performance of the HPCG benchmark to evaluate the potentials of supercomputers with balanced memory and computational performance against heterogeneous and cutting-edge scalar parallel systems.     

Vocational training in the use of new technologies for people with disabilities

Following a brief review of the literature, details are given of an in-depth evaluation of a computer training centre called Microjob. This facility set out to integrate computer training, vocational guidance, functional assessment, placement in employment and post-placement support into a single service delivery package. In this paper the facility's outcome record is examined in relation to targets set for it, consideration is given to the special needs of home-based trainees, and specific difficulties faced by the project (including an inefficient management structure, inadequate staff training and a poor level of awareness of clients' special needs) are discussed.