"Das Programm sieht ja nicht nur gut aus, es macht auch genau das was ich will!" - solche oder ähnliche Aussagen liest man oft, wenn Software-Programme von Anwendern beurteilt werden. Was Nutzer damit beschreiben ist weitestgehend als Look & Feel einer Anwendung bekannt. Der Begriff Look bezieht sich dabei auf die visuellen Bestandteile der Anwendung, wie die genutzten Medienelemente und deren Layout. Das Themenfeld Feel umfasst das interaktive Verhalten einer Anwendung, die auf Eingaben des Nutzers reagiert (Feedback) oder bereits vorher Hinweise auf die eigene Verwendbarkeit gibt (Feed-Forward). Allgemein gilt, je interaktiver eine Anwendung, desto wichtiger ist das "Gefühl" im Look & Feel. Als Beispiel dienen die sogenannten natürlichen Benutzerschnittstellen (NUI), wie die sich in den letzten Jahren enorm verbreitende Form des Multi-Touches. Bei dieser interagiert der Nutzer direkt mit der Anwendung ohne separate Eingabegeräte als Vermittler seiner Aktionen. Eine weitere Charakteristik dieser Benutzerschnittstellen ist deren intuitive Verwendbarkeit. Dies bedeutet, dass sich während der Interaktion mit den Programmen deren Strukturen und Funktionen von selbst erschließen. Um dies zu gewährleisten ist die sorgsame Gestaltung des Feels von Beginn der Entwicklung an bedeutsam. Umso überraschender ist das Ergebnis unseres Vergleichs aktueller Prototyping-Werkzeuge für Benutzeroberflächen, die den Aspekt Feel oftmals nicht oder nur unzureichend berücksichtigen und stattdessen das Aussehen (Look) einer Anwendung fokussieren. In unserer kürzlich erschienenen Arbeit "Look without Feel - A Basal Gap in the Multi-Touch Prototyping Process", die wir auf der Konferenz "Mensch und Computer 2013" in Bremen präsentierten und die mit dem Honorable Mention Paper Award ausgezeichnet wurde, untersuchten wir diesen Sachverhalt für den Prototyping-Prozess von Multi-Touch Anwendungen genauer.

For many it is a problem not to be able to read the daily newspaper. Compilations of a week’s newspaper articles are a compromise. Computer owners do not need to compromise as they can read their daily on their pc. But what if you don’t have a pc? For non- pc-owners the ORIONWebbox can be a godsend. The ORIONWebbox is a simple device that can easily navigate through a daily newspaper supporting the DAISY protocol and making use of TTS. In Finland and Belgium we have access to daily newspapers. Explanation of management of content per user follows.

Wikis are widely used by communities to create and update documents on the Web. This presentation describes the potential of Wikis for producing DAISY (more precisely DTBook) contents. We discuss how to convert existing Wiki contents into DTBook. We also examine how DAISY content producers could use Wikis as an easy and free tool to collaboratively edit their documents. The case of MediaWiki is studied (this Wiki software is used by Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikibooks, …). We describe how to expand its functionalities as to make possible the importation and exportation of DTbook contents.

Mobilitätseingeschränkte Fußgänger, wie etwa Rollstuhlfahrer, blinde und sehbehinderte Menschen oder Senioren, stellen besondere Anforderungen an die Berechnung geeigneter Routen. Die kürzeste Route ist nicht immer die am besten geeignete. In dieser Arbeit wird das Verfahren der multimodalen Annotation entwickelt, welches die Erweiterung der geographischen Basisdaten durch die Benutzer selbst erlaubt. Auf Basis der durch das Verfahren gewonnenen Daten werden Konzepte zu personalisierten Routenberechnung auf Grundlage der individuellen Anforderungen der Benutzer entwickelt. Das beschriebene Verfahren wurde erfolgreich mit insgesamt 35 Benutzern evaluiert und bildet somit die Grundlage für weiterführende Arbeiten in diesem Bereich. / Mobility impaired pedestrians such as wheelchair users, blind and visually impaired, or elderly people impose specific requirements upon the calculation of appropriate routes. The shortest path might not be the best. Within this thesis, the concept of multimodal annotation is developed. The concept allows for extension of the geographical base data by users. Further concepts are developed allowing for the application of the acquired data for the calculation of personalized routes based on the requirements of the individual user. The concept of multimodal annotation was successfully evaluated incorporating 35 users and may be used as the base for further research in the area.

The overwhelming amount of online news presents a challenge called news information overload. To mitigate this challenge we propose a system to generate a causal network of news topics. To extract this information from distributed news sources, a system called Forest was developed. Forest retrieves documents that potentially contain causal information regarding a news topic. The documents are processed at a sentence level to extract causal relations and news topic references, these are the phases used to refer to a news topic. Forest uses a machine learning approach to classify causal sentences, and then renders the potential cause and effect of the sentences. The potential cause and effect are then classified as news topic references, these are the phrases used to refer to a news topics, such as “The World Cup” or “The Financial Meltdown”. Both classifiers use an algorithm developed within our working group, the algorithm performs better than several well known classification algorithms for the aforementioned tasks. In our evaluations we found that participants consider causal information useful to understand the news, and that while we can not extract causal information for all news topics, it is highly likely that we can extract causal relation for the most popular news topics. To evaluate the accuracy of the extractions made by Forest, we completed a user survey. We found that by providing the top ranked results, we obtained a high accuracy in extracting causal relations between news topics.

It is still recognized as a challenge task while blind and visually impaired people travel outdoor independently, even if there are a number of assistive mobility aids available. In addition to building universal facilities in urban and rural environments for them, it is essential to develop novel mobility assistive technologies and systems to satisfy their increasing demands for mobility. To investigate those demands, an international survey with 106 blind and visually impaired people from 13 countries is undertaken within this work, with regarding to outdoor mobility experiences, usages of mobile devices and collaborative approaches. From the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Accessibility, the dissertation focuses on enhancing blind people’s capabilities of acquisition of spatial environmental information from tactile displays. The spatial environmental information, in this study, is in terms of clusters of surrounding obstacles, geographic information on city maps, and information on environmental accessibility. In order to non-visual representation of the clusters of surroundings obstacles detected by a 3D Time-of-Flight (ToF) infrared camera, a portable pin-matrix display with a matrix of 30 x 32 pins is employed and a pre-designed set of tactile obstacle symbols is used to render the properties of obstacles (e.g., type, size). Additionally, aiming at helping blind people access geographic information, a desktop based pin-matrix display (an array of 60 x 120 pins) and a mobile pin-matrix display (an array of 30 x 32 pins) are used to represent a large-scale city map and a location-aware city map, respectively. A set of tactile map symbols rendered with the raised and lowered pins, has been designed for rendering various map features. To allow blind and visually impaired people to acquire information on environmental accessibility, besides a traditional web browser client and a popular smart phone client, an audio-haptic client on a tactile display with 7200 pins is developed. Users are able to create and share collaborative annotations on environmental accessibility across the 3 clients. The proposed approaches about non-visual representation of obstacles and map features by tactile symbols on pin-matrix displays, will contribute to the fields of accessible tactile graphic well, especially in the coming era of affordable pin-matrix displays. Meanwhile, the collaborative approach for improving environmental accessibility will encourage the society to raise the floor of accessibility for all. A number of further studies can be continued based on the current findings within this work, aiming at enhancing mobility aids for blind and visually impaired people gradually.

Das Bibliothekswesen steht vor der Herausforderung, die rasant wachsende und umfassende Verbreitung digitaler Medien in neue Nutzungskonzepte einzubinden, beispielsweise durch eine Steigerung der Aufenthaltsqualität. (vgl. Bonte, 2011) Begriffe wie digital library, hybrid library oder blended library versuchen, die Rolle der Bibliotheken im digitalen Zeitalter neu zu definieren. (vgl. Gläser, 2008) Die Sächsische Landes- und Universitätsbibliothek (SLUB) begegnet dieser Herausforderung unter anderem mit dem verstärkten Aufbau digitaler Bestände. Sie verfügt daher über umfangreiche digitale Kollektionen, die mit Hilfe eines geplanten öffentlichen interaktiven Systems für die Bibliotheksbesucher auf ansprechende Weise erfahrbar gemacht werden sollen. Die Exploration der digitalen Sammlungen steht dabei im Vordergrund, bereits existierende Katalogfunktionalität soll nicht ersetzt, sondern ergänzt werden. Zu diesem Zweck wird untersucht, wie durch öffentliche Interaktion das Interesse an digitalen Inhalten am Beispiel der Sammlung „Deutsche Fotothek“ gesteigert werden kann. Dabei wird besonders betrachtet, wie durch Embodied Interaction in Verbindung mit der Visualisierung des komplexen Informationsraumes der digitalen Sammlungen eine leicht erlernbare gestenbasierte Steuerung erreicht werden kann. (Dourish, 2004) Der Hauptbeitrag dieser Arbeit liegt in der Konzeption und Umsetzung eines Anwendungsprototypen, der im öffentlichen Bereich der SLUB installiert wird.

An increasing demand for providing accessible content to widely differentiated target groups calls for a universal eBook standard combined with a flexible user interface. For this purpose, we enhanced the current DAISY standard to serve the blind and visually handicapped as well as deaf, hearing impaired, dyslexic and elderly users. In addition to supporting sign language videos and alternatives in simplified language, we introduced videos with media enrichments as a primary source. Additionally a personalizable web player, based on the Adobe Flex Framework, allows real-time streaming and local playback of original and newly developed multimedia DAISY books. Furthermore, the player supports multimodal input such as gesture and speech recognition to facilitate use by physically handicapped people.

Software support for the generation of good Braille has historically been hampered by fragmented and small markets. Some languages have good commercial support, others are lacking. Fortunately Liblouis, an open source tool for complete Braille transcription services, is emerging as a universal solution. Liblouis provides Braille translation for literary and computer Braille, offers support for contracted and uncontracted translation for many languages and includes support for Braille mathematics codes such as Nemeth. Liblouis also provides Braille formatting, which can handle many document formats including DTBook XML. Both the translation and the formatting can easily be adapted to new languages and document formats. This paper shows how Liblouis will be used at the Swiss Library for the Blind and Visually Impaired to integrate Braille generation into a production workflow based around DTBook XML.

Is it possible to produce DAISY talking books of acceptable quality without manually adjusting the reading order, inserting page numbers, fine-tuning lexicons, and so on? This question is especially urgent with regard to our open educational resources published on the OpenLearn website. This presentation recounts our experiences of a fully automated production process for DAISY talking books using only open source tools.