O crescente número de pessoas que utilizam a Web e sua vasta quantidade de conteúdo têm motivado especialistas em computação a investigar e acompanhar a experimentação desses usuários. Podese observar que um grande número de usuários que adere ao uso da Internet é o das pessoas com meia-idade, de 40 a 59 anos, e os idosos com idade superior a 60 anos. Trata-se de um público interessado e potencialmente pró-ativo para usufruir das possibilidades que a Web proporciona a cada dia. No entanto, barreiras que dificultam o acesso à informação são naturalmente encontradas com o avançar da idade. Dificuldades como a perda parcial ou total da visão, a redução de precisão dos movimentos, e a diminuição de memorização dos passos a serem realizados são alguns exemplos dessas barreiras. Para superar as dificuldades apresentadas pelos usuários, estudos têm sido realizados visando minimizá-las, de maneira geral. Seus resultados encontram-se sintetizados em normas / orientações a serem seguidas visando proporcionar melhor usabilidade e acessibilidade para toda diversidade de usuários. Nesse contexto, na presente pesquisa, investiga-se quais dessas normas junto com os padrões para a criação de websites que disponibilizam conteúdos proporcionam melhor adequação para atender à demanda das pessoas com idade mais avançada. Assim, foram estudados diferentes tipos de menus de navegação que disponibilizam as subnavegações conforme a necessidade do usuário (no inglês conhecido como menus drop-down) com diferentes propriedades e avaliado qual menu e suas propriedades apresentavam melhores resultados, entre eles, foi verificado o tempo de uso do menu e o número de erros cometidos para uma determinada tarefa. Conclui-se que, menus com melhores contraste e um tempo mediano de resposta ao realizar a interação, apresentaram melhores resultados / With the constant number of people who use facilitated through the use of the Web and its vast amount of content, have motivated computer specialists to investigate and monitor the trial of those users. It may be noted that a large number of users joining the Internet use is that of people aged mature (middle-aged, 40 to 59 years, and the elderly aged 60 years). It is a potentially interested public and pro-active to enjoy the possibilities that the Web provides each day. However, barriers to access to information are found naturally with advancing age, difficulties as the partial or total loss of vision, reducing accuracy of movements, and decreased retention of steps to be performed are some examples of these barriers . To overcome the difficulties presented by the users, studies have been conducted in order to minimize them in general. Their results are summarized in standards / guidelines to be followed in order to provide better usability and accessibility for the whole range of different types of users. In this context, the present study, we investigate which of these standards along with standards for the creation of websites that provide content provide better adaptation to meet the demand of people with older age. Thus, we studied different types of navigation menus that provide the subnavegações as needed by the user with different properties and evaluated their properties which menu and had better results, among them was found the time to use the menu and the number of errors for a particular task. It can be concluded that menus with better contrast and a median time of response to make the interaction, showed better results

While credibility perception on the Web is a well-researched topic across multiple disciplines, extant studies have not considered nonvisual modalities of Web access. This research explores how Web users who are blind or visually impaired perceive the credibility of online information and how the screen reader used by them to interact with the Web mediates the process. Credibility perception was studied in the context of the screen reader users’ everyday information practices, examining in depth the effect of Web accessibility on their online information interactions, information practices and credibility perception. Adopting an exploratory approach, a sequential multimethods research design was used. Between April and July 2008 data were collected from adult screen reader users residing in Ontario, Canada through an electronic questionnaire survey (N=60) to identify salient issues, which were then examined deeper through semi-structured interviews with a subsample (N=13) during June 2009. Hands-on online information activities (with participant observation and think-aloud protocol) were also conducted during the interview session. Primary findings emerged through qualitative content analysis of descriptive data, with quantitative results guiding and supplementing the analysis. Online information credibility perception is found to be a dynamic and social process. It is governed by users’ assumptions based on their past experiences, personal knowledge/beliefs and social inputs. Assumptions evolve over time and usage into personal heuristics. The credibility perception process spans three phases—prediction, evaluation and corroboration—permeating the information seeking, using and sharing practices of users. Evaluation of website and web content depends on users’ online interaction proficiency and is bounded by the interface affordances provided by the screen reader and the amount of meta-information provided by the websites for interpreting visual/spatial features. Community support scaffolds users towards more effective technology management and credibility perception. Therefore, promoting inclusion in the online participatory culture will enhance the information practices of screen reader users.

While credibility perception on the Web is a well-researched topic across multiple disciplines, extant studies have not considered nonvisual modalities of Web access. This research explores how Web users who are blind or visually impaired perceive the credibility of online information and how the screen reader used by them to interact with the Web mediates the process. Credibility perception was studied in the context of the screen reader users’ everyday information practices, examining in depth the effect of Web accessibility on their online information interactions, information practices and credibility perception. Adopting an exploratory approach, a sequential multimethods research design was used. Between April and July 2008 data were collected from adult screen reader users residing in Ontario, Canada through an electronic questionnaire survey (N=60) to identify salient issues, which were then examined deeper through semi-structured interviews with a subsample (N=13) during June 2009. Hands-on online information activities (with participant observation and think-aloud protocol) were also conducted during the interview session. Primary findings emerged through qualitative content analysis of descriptive data, with quantitative results guiding and supplementing the analysis. Online information credibility perception is found to be a dynamic and social process. It is governed by users’ assumptions based on their past experiences, personal knowledge/beliefs and social inputs. Assumptions evolve over time and usage into personal heuristics. The credibility perception process spans three phases—prediction, evaluation and corroboration—permeating the information seeking, using and sharing practices of users. Evaluation of website and web content depends on users’ online interaction proficiency and is bounded by the interface affordances provided by the screen reader and the amount of meta-information provided by the websites for interpreting visual/spatial features. Community support scaffolds users towards more effective technology management and credibility perception. Therefore, promoting inclusion in the online participatory culture will enhance the information practices of screen reader users.

Workshop Mensch-Computer-Vernetzung vom 14.-17. April 2003 in Löbsal (bei Meißen)

Workshop Mensch-Computer-Vernetzung Web Accessibility Gestaltung von Webseiten um eine Nutzung mit vielen verschiedenen Zugangsmgeräten (Scrennreader, Bildschirmlupe) und unter verschiedenen technischen Bedingungen (langsame Anbindung, veraltete Software, keine Farbe) weitestgehend uneingeschränkt zu ermöglichen.

In the context of a society were the Web is present in many aspects, there is asignificant amount of visually impaired users whose experience is far from beingsatisfactory. There are technologies aiming this problem but still with no full suc-cess. The problem addressed in this project is the existing gap between the visuallyimpaired users and the solutions being offered to them. As a solution to this problem,a middleware prototype is developed. It acts as a web application so the user doesnot need to install anything. The middleware also offers different adaptations to theuser such as amplifying lens, text narrator, and others. The solution was tested byvisually impaired users and it received an overall positive result. Some features likethe amplifying lens received a good value and some of them need further improve-ment.

Στη σημερινή κοινωνία της πληροφορίας, το Διαδίκτυο αποτελεί ένα πολύτιμο εργαλείο ανταλλαγής ιδεών και πληροφοριών. Η εύκολη και αποτελεσματική πρόσβαση στο Διαδίκτυο για όλους τους ανθρώπους, ανεξάρτητα από τις φυσικές ή νοητικές τους ικανότητες, αποτελεί επιτακτική ανάγκη τόσο για ηθικούς όσο και για οικονομικούς λόγους. Στόχος της συγκεκριμένης διπλωματικής εργασίας είναι η παρουσίαση των μιας εφαρμογής που αποσκοπεί: α) στην ευαισθητοποίηση των σχεδιαστών δικτυακών τόπων σε θέματα προσβασιμότητας και β) στη μεταλαμπάδευση των βασικών κανόνων και πρακτικών που απαιτούνται για την υλοποίηση προσβάσιμων δικτυακών τόπων. Η βασική ιδέα της εργασίας είναι η δημιουργία ενός ελεύθερα διατιθέμενου Διαδικτυακού εργαλείου το οποίο να αναδεικνύει μέσω αντιπροσωπευτικών παραδειγμάτων τα προβλήματα που προκύπτουν από την έλλειψη προσβασιμότητας και να επιτρέπει την εκμάθηση των βασικών σχεδιαστικών κανόνων προσβασιμότητας. Το εργαλείο αυτό απευθύνεται τόσο στους ανθρώπους που αναπτύσσουν σήμερα ιστοτόπους όσο και σε φοιτητές και καθηγητές που διαμορφώνουν σε κάποιο βαθμό τη συνείδηση και τις πρακτικές των μελλοντικών σχεδιαστών. Στα πλαίσια της σχεδίασης του εν λόγω εργαλείου έγινε αρχικά μια εκτενής μελέτη στην οποία διερευνήθηκε η προσβασιμότητα 50 ελληνικών δικτυακών τόπων. Από τη μελέτη αυτή προέκυψαν αντιπροσωπευτικά παραδείγματα παραβίασης των κανόνων προσβασιμότητας, τα οποία αποτελούν το βασικό περιεχόμενο της εφαρμογής. Παράλληλα η διπλωματική εργασία περιγράφει βασικές έννοιες που σχετίζονται με την διαδικτυακή προσβασιμότητα, όπως τις κατηγορίες ανθρώπων που αφορά κυρίως, τις βοηθητικές τεχνολογίες που χρησιμοποιούν, καθώς και τις μεθοδολογίες που χρησιμοποιούνται για την αξιολόγηση της προσβασιμότητας δικτυακών τόπων. / Ιn today’s information society the Web has become an invaluable way to access information and exchange ideas. Providing easy and effective access to the Web for all people, despite their different physical and cognitive abilities, is an essential aspect for both moral and financial reasons. The goal of this thesis is to present an application that aims to: a) increase awareness of web designers on the subject of accessibility and b) disseminate and teach Web accessibility guidelines and good design practices. The thesis describes the design steps followed to produce a freely-distributed web-based application that adopts an example-based learning approach. The tool exposes people to the accessibility impasses that arise when certain, established guidelines are violated and supports its users to learn existing accessibility guidelines and good design practices. The tool is addressed to Web practitioners, teachers and last but not least students who currently shape their future Web development practices. The examples used in the tool were derived from an in-depth, web accessibility evaluation study of 50 Greek websites. The thesis also provides introductory information to the subject of web accessibility, such as people mainly affected by inaccessible websites, assistive technologies and accessibility evaluation methods and tools.

The digital world is acquiring more space in today’s society. With this being said, it is important to keep the web content interpretable for everyone, despite any kind of disability. This study focuses on colour vision deficiency and how to implement a real-time colour correction instantly in the web browser, without any additional assistive technologies needed. Two almost identical webpages have been developed for this project, with the difference being that one is with a colour correction function and one without, who then are measured in page-loading time to see if there is any greater loss of performance when executing the colour conversion.

People with Autism Spectrum Disorder experience difficulties with reading comprehension and information processing, which affect their school performance, employability and social inclusion. The main goal of this work is to investigate new ways to evaluate and improve text and web accessibility for adults with autism. The first stage of this research involved using eye-tracking technology and comprehension testing to collect data from a group of participants with autism and a control group of participants without autism. This series of studies resulted in the development of the ASD corpus, which is the first multimodal corpus of text and gaze data obtained from participants with and without autism. We modelled text complexity and sentence complexity using sets of features matched to the reading difficulties people with autism experience. For document-level classification we trained a readability classifier on a generic corpus with known readability levels (easy, medium and difficult) and then used the ASD corpus to evaluate with unseen user-assessed data. For sentence-level classification, we used for the first time gaze data and comprehension testing to define a gold standard of easy and difficult sentences, which we then used as training and evaluation sets for sentence-level classification. The results showed that both classifiers outperformed other measures of complexity and were more accurate predictors of the comprehension of people with autism. We conducted a series of experiments evaluating easy-to-read documents for people with cognitive disabilities. Easy-to-read documents are written in an accessible way, following specific writing guidelines and containing both text and images. We focused mainly on the image component of these documents, a topic which has been significantly under-studied compared to the text component; we were also motivated by the fact that people with autism are very strong visual thinkers and that therefore image insertion could be a way to use their strengths in visual thinking to compensate for their difficulties in reading. We investigated the effects images in text have on attention, comprehension, memorisation and user preferences in people with autism (all of these phenomena were investigated both objectively and subjectively). The results of these experiments were synthesised in a set of guidelines for improving text accessibility for people with autism. Finally, we evaluated the accessibility of web pages with different levels of visual complexity. We provide evidence of existing barriers to finding relevant information on web pages that people with autism face and we explore their subjective experiences with searching the web through survey questions.

O crescente número de pessoas que utilizam a Web e sua vasta quantidade de conteúdo têm motivado especialistas em computação a investigar e acompanhar a experimentação desses usuários. Podese observar que um grande número de usuários que adere ao uso da Internet é o das pessoas com meia-idade, de 40 a 59 anos, e os idosos com idade superior a 60 anos. Trata-se de um público interessado e potencialmente pró-ativo para usufruir das possibilidades que a Web proporciona a cada dia. No entanto, barreiras que dificultam o acesso à informação são naturalmente encontradas com o avançar da idade. Dificuldades como a perda parcial ou total da visão, a redução de precisão dos movimentos, e a diminuição de memorização dos passos a serem realizados são alguns exemplos dessas barreiras. Para superar as dificuldades apresentadas pelos usuários, estudos têm sido realizados visando minimizá-las, de maneira geral. Seus resultados encontram-se sintetizados em normas / orientações a serem seguidas visando proporcionar melhor usabilidade e acessibilidade para toda diversidade de usuários. Nesse contexto, na presente pesquisa, investiga-se quais dessas normas junto com os padrões para a criação de websites que disponibilizam conteúdos proporcionam melhor adequação para atender à demanda das pessoas com idade mais avançada. Assim, foram estudados diferentes tipos de menus de navegação que disponibilizam as subnavegações conforme a necessidade do usuário (no inglês conhecido como menus drop-down) com diferentes propriedades e avaliado qual menu e suas propriedades apresentavam melhores resultados, entre eles, foi verificado o tempo de uso do menu e o número de erros cometidos para uma determinada tarefa. Conclui-se que, menus com melhores contraste e um tempo mediano de resposta ao realizar a interação, apresentaram melhores resultados / With the constant number of people who use facilitated through the use of the Web and its vast amount of content, have motivated computer specialists to investigate and monitor the trial of those users. It may be noted that a large number of users joining the Internet use is that of people aged mature (middle-aged, 40 to 59 years, and the elderly aged 60 years). It is a potentially interested public and pro-active to enjoy the possibilities that the Web provides each day. However, barriers to access to information are found naturally with advancing age, difficulties as the partial or total loss of vision, reducing accuracy of movements, and decreased retention of steps to be performed are some examples of these barriers . To overcome the difficulties presented by the users, studies have been conducted in order to minimize them in general. Their results are summarized in standards / guidelines to be followed in order to provide better usability and accessibility for the whole range of different types of users. In this context, the present study, we investigate which of these standards along with standards for the creation of websites that provide content provide better adaptation to meet the demand of people with older age. Thus, we studied different types of navigation menus that provide the subnavegações as needed by the user with different properties and evaluated their properties which menu and had better results, among them was found the time to use the menu and the number of errors for a particular task. It can be concluded that menus with better contrast and a median time of response to make the interaction, showed better results