Dear All,
A few people have requested that I give a brief outline of the ACCESS
project which the Sensory Disabilities Research Unit (SDRU) has been
involved in for the last 3 years. The ACCESS project is an EU funded
project and the consortium of partners come from the UK, Italy, Finland and
Greece.
The project has developed a number of tools to support unified access to
user interfaces. That is, access by both disabled and able-bodied users.
These tools allow developers to construct interfaces which can be adapted
to the needs of a given user group, for example visual, motor or cognitive
disabled groups.
Applications in two areas have been created during the ACCESS project, to
demonstrate the use of these tools. We have been involved in the
development of one of these demonstrators, which is a hypermedia
application for blind students. The design of the 'Demonstrator' was based
on an extensive study of the requirements of blind students and has
involved the continuous evaluations of the prototype in educational
settings by blind students. The content of the hypermedia is presented as
text, audio (music clips, digitised speech, sound effects) and pictures
(with auditory descriptions and tactile pictures). The interface uses
refreshable Braille, digitised and synthetic speech for output. Input is
via a conventional keyboard, a touchtablet or a Joystick. The interface
provides navigation and orientation commands, and commands for controlling
the output. We very much hope that the results from our studies will
provide a good basis for developing a web browser for the visually
impaired.
Some of our recent findings have been written up in a paper (in press)
which we hope will be presented at Hypertext '97 in April. Another paper
"Access to hypermedia systems for blind students" by Petrie, Morley,
McNally, Graziani, & Emiliani (1996) can be found at the SDRU web site
http://phoenix.herts.ac.uk/PsyDocs/sdru/index.html
Best Wishes,
Anne-Marie O'Neill
Sensory Disabilities Research Unit,
Psychology Department,
University of Hertfordshire,
Hatfield, Herts.
AL10 9AB.
U.K.
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