The web is a valuable resource and increasingly important source of information and communication. To be excluded from access to it is becoming a growing handicap. There can be many barriers to access, economics being perhaps the major one, but also having a visual disability can make access difficult - because of the visual orientation of much of the web (Edwards & Stevens, 1997). Blind people can access computers using screen reader software, which can translate the contents of the screen into the non-visual form of synthetic speech (Edwards, 1991) or braille (Weber, 1994; Weber, 1995). However, such systems cannot cope with graphical items, such as images and image maps. Some web site managers, who are aware of this problem, attempt to tackle it by providing parallel, text-only pages. (See, for instance, the YorkWeb pages). These contain the same information as the graphical pages (or at least, ought to) but are better suited to non-visual browsing.
There are a number of problems with this approach. The main one is that it (at least) doubles the amount of effort required to maintain the site. A corollory of that is that it is generally the text-only pages which fall into disrepair, which retain out-of-date information. The objective of this project would be to build tools that could be used to facilitate the creation and maintenance of text-only pages.
There are two parts to the establishment of parallel text-only pages: their creation and their maintenance. It is unrealistic to expect a tool to automatically generate a completely equivalent text-only version of an arbitrary web page, but it could be used to point out to the author items which are non-textual and hint as to how to translate it. Bobby is an on-line tool which tests pages for accessibility which gives these kinds of hints, and it could be used to assist in the creation of the text-only pages.
Tools developed within the project could assist in setting up a parallel directory structure and provide a systematic naming convention. Thereafter, in the maintenance phase, other tools might track when the graphical pages are updated and remind the manager to synchronize the non-text version.
The student will be expected to produce a web page describing the project.
Mobile, portable devices such as watches, phones and GPS receivers, are usually limited in the number of buttons that can be attached to them. It is impractical to have a full qwerty keyboard, and yet there is often a need to be able to input many and complex messages. There are a variety of ways that a single button can me used
Yanyu Li (2000) carried out a set of experiments in which she measured the time taken by a vriety of people to perform each of these clicks. From her data it is possible to suggest time constraints that can be applied to characterize each kind of click (Edwards & Li, 2001). The objective of this project would be to test her results. That is to say that say that an experiment would be carried out whereby participants must make clicks according to these parameters and then predictions (such as the numbers of errors) can be tested.
The project is well defined. It would require the designing of an experiment (Robson, 1994) and carrying it out. On the basis of the results it should be possible to refine the recommendations as to the parameters of the different click types.
The student will be expected to produce a web page describing the project.
Tables use a spatial arrangement to facilitate access to certain types of information. It can be very difficult to access the same information if it is presented in a non-visual form (such as speech) as is required by blind people. For instance, most screen readers (Edwards, 1991) simply read lines horizontally, regardless of the columnar structure. Previous student projects have tackled this problem already. Bufton (1991) implemented a simple table browser, using Rich Text Format (RTF) files as input. Sinclaire (1999) implemented a similar browser, but based on HTML files. Finally, van Kemenade (2000) produced the specification of the design of a browser, using Mitsopoulos' design methodology (Mitsopoulos and Edwards, 1999). He did not implement his design and that would be the objective of this project.
The project would involve programming, including generation of speech and non-speech sounds. (The sudent would have to decide which is the appropropriate language, but C or C++ are most likely candidates). The implementation would have to be evaluated, probably by comparison with the earlier tools of Bufton and Sinclaire as well as subjective evaluation by human testers.
The student will be expected to produce a web page describing the project.
One group of people who have difficulty accessing the web are those with visual disabilities. (See, WWW6, 1997, and particularly Edwards and Stevens, 1997). Clearly graphical items can cause particular problems. One way of alleviating the problems of image elements advocated by accessibility guidelines (for instance, those of the Web Accessibility Initiative, WAI) is the use of 'alt' texts. This is an optional text label that the page designer can include in any image tag. This text can be picked up by a browser, and (in the case of non-visual browsing for a blind user) displayed instead of the visual graphic.
However, there is a problem about how best to use this facility. What should one put in the alt text? For instance, the University web pages often include banners with a graphical representation of the university logo (see, for example the York student page). Should the alt text simple echo the text in the banner (i.e. "University of York") or should it try to include extra information about the appearance of the graphic (e.g. "The words 'University of York' in white type, with the word 'York' in an italic style script")?
The answer to such questions probably depends on the intended role of the image. It seems there is a spectrum of uses. At one extreme such images are purely decorative, while at the other the graphic embody all the information on a page (a reproduction of a painting, for instance). So, the first objective of this project would be to develop a classification of the use of images within web pages. Is there a small but comprehensive set of categories into which most web images can be put?
If so, then it may be possible to develop guidelines as to what kind of information should be included in the alt texts for each category of image use. Once such guidelines have been developed, they could be tested, rather as Hayward (1997) did.
The student will be expected to produce a web page describing the project.
To what extent can you use Microsoft Windows and its common applications without using the mouse? As most users are aware, there are often keyboard alternatives available. Most users choose the mouse or keyboard alternative according to the convenience of the alternative. However, some people cannot use a mouse - because they have a disability - and they need to know how much and what they can achieve through the keyboard alone. Information on this is sparse and there is therefore a need for an accessible manual on keyboard-only access. It would be the objective of this project to produce such a manual.
The project will require the aquistion of excellent knowledge of Windows. Some understanding of the needs of physically disabled computer users will help. Also there will be a need to be able to produce a clear and understandable manual.
Relevant references include: Edwards (1995), Ability (the journal of the BCS Disability Group); the IET notes; Draper & Oatley (1992).
The student will be expected to produce a web page describing the project.
Deaf people can use telephone through text terminals, sometimes called Minicoms or Telephone Devices for the Deaf (TDDs). Communication with another Minicom user is straight-forward, but if the deaf person wants to communicate with a hearing person (who does not posses a Minicom) then they have to use the Typetalk service. This uses a human intermediary who reads messages from the deaf person to the hearing one, listens to the response and types that back to the deaf person. Clearly this is an inconvenient form of communication which lacks confidentiality.
It would seem a good application for speech technology. A speech synthesizer could be used to vocalize the deaf person's input and a speech recognizer could convert the hearing person's input to text. At the current state of the technology, this is not quite practical; reliable speaker independent speech recognition is not available. However, the objective of this project would be to investigate how this might best be achieved when the technology is available. That is to say that a speaker dependent speech recognizer would be trained up to an individual, and then that person would practice conversations with another user, using a keyboard (and speech synthesizer). The objective would be to uncover the human factor problems of using such a system. For instance, are there difficulties in conversation due to the delay caused by the typing of their next utterance? Should the words be echoed one by one, or at the end of the sentence?
(This study would be in some ways similar to that of Newell et al, 1990, in which they simulated speech input by a human transcriber).
Wloskowicz, Lukaszewicz & Radecki (1999) is a (rare) relevant publication. See also the IET course web page.
The student will be expected to produce a web page describing the project.
Multimodal computer interfaces increasingly make use of non-speech sounds. The designer of such a system should have some idea what kinds of sounds willbe usable by the average person. That implies that sounds should be tested. In running such tests, though, one wants ideally to eliminate any bias towards participants with special abilities. In other words, an interface may be unviable if it is usable only by people with developed musical abilities. But what does it mean to say that an individual has good musical ability and how does one measure it?
This has been the subject of work by John Hankinson and Ben Challis (Edwards, et al., 2000; Hankinson, Challis & Edwards, 1999). They have developed a standard test that can be used to measure musical ability. In a previous student project, Fiona Pirie (1999) pilot tested this test. There remains, though , a question as to how best to represent the results of the test.
There are a number of questions. Can musical ability be expressed as a single score, covering all aspects - rather as some people believe that intelligence is represented by the single dimension of an IQ (Gardner, 1985)? If so, how should scores in different aspects of the test be combined? How can different people's scores be compared. Most importantly, is the test reliable and valid?
This project would best suit a student who already has a good grounding in statistics.
The student will be expected to produce a web page describing the project.
Forty-three percent of the UK population use mobile phones to send and receive text messages (Travis, 2001). Why is this so?
Text messaging seems like a technological development. 'Hey, it might be useful to be able to send short text messages.' 'Yeah, and it will soak up a bit of unused bandwidth.' Was it really this way? The first part of the project would be to find out a bit of the history.
Given the dreadful user interface for inputting text on a numeric keypad (Edwards & Li, 2001; Li, 2000; Byrne, 2001; McLaughlin, 1997; Detweiler, Schumacher & Gattuso, 1990) any HCI expert would have asserted that the feature would never catch on ...but it has.
The objective of this project would be to find out why. What is it about the facility of text messaging that makes it so attractive - despite its obvious limitations. It seems likely that this would require looking at usability in a broader perspective than traditionally, as might be found in Bouch, Kuchinsky & Bhatti, 2000; Lee, Kim & Moon, 2000 or Pu & Faltings, 2000. Ultimately the question would be addressed through a survey of text message users.
The student will be expected to produce a web page describing the project.
Software manufacturers retain their market share by constantly adding features to their products. In this way, customers are enticed into buying new versions of the software. This keeps the manufacturers in business and also supports the hardware manufacturers who can produce ever more powerful machines to run the new software. However, it is suggested (by Don Norman, 1998, among others) that constantly adding new features (sometimes referred to as 'creeping featurism') does not help the average user, because most of them are unaware of many (the majority?) of the features available in the software they use - which are being incorporated at an exponential rate.
The objective of this project would be to test this hypothesis. This would be done by surveying users of a popular application, Microsoft Word, and ascertaining how many of its commands people use. A simple scale would be used from 'I use this command frequently' through to 'I have no idea what this command is'. The survey would be carried out on the web, for maximum response. It would therefore require the programming of a web form. This in turn should be dynamic and a little bit intelligent, in that it should order the questions such that the most-used commands are presented first. On the assumption that no one will give the time to go through the hundreds of commands available, respondents must be given the option at any time to respond, 'I've had enough! don't ask me any more!'
The project is quite well defined, but would require a certain level of programming ability in order to produce the kind of dynamic - but fast - web forms required. Programming would probably be in Perl or C.
The student will be expected to produce a web page describing the project.
This project has been self-defined in order to bridge the gap between projects PCW2 and PCW4 and therefore to mould a deeper analysis suitable for MscIP.
The web is changing quickly. No-longer is HTML the de-facto standard of page creation, pages full of text with nested links and standard colour schemes. The introduction of DHTML, JavaScript and the ever increasing use of Flash is starting to split the web into two areas. Ent-sites such as MTV2.com provide heavily plug-in dependant pages that require exploration and time, and info-sites such as Amazon or the BBC which as based on a more defined user-experience where information needs to be presented quickly and clearly and navigation needs to be geared more towards the actions and goals model. Combined with an analysis of current site diversity this study also aims to look at some of the tricks used by e-tailers such as Amazon to disrupt the user's navigation path to buy more and different goods - rather like the supermarket that changes its aisles. Pulling this together it is hoped that a clearer understanding of the present and future of the web's navigation experience will emerge.
Based closely around the techniques expected for PCW4 this project will approach the analysis of navigation with the Wright et al. (2000) distributed cognition model in mind and develop a technique for the evaluation of the navigation methods. As part of this it is hoped that two sites will be utilised, the already established Athletic Union website (as built by myself) and a deeper more complex version of the site built using DHTML and Flash with 'user experience' in mind. From this evaluation it is expected that key areas of user-experience should emerge and be more fully explored using a bolt-on technique for evaluation of the user-experience. Analysis will incorporate ideas from both psychology in terms of cognition, real-world analogies and socio-cultural influences as well as the backbone of the sites in terms of what is achievable with (D)HTML and Flash.
*ADNE has a copy of references marked with an asterisk.
Bouch, A., Kuchinsky, A. and Bhatti, N. (2000). Quality is in the eye of the beholder: Meeting users' requirements for internet quality of service. (in) The Future is Here: Proceedings of Chi 2000, T. Turner, G. Szwillus, M. Czerwiniski and F. Paternò (Eds.) pp. 297-304, The Hague, NL, ACM Press Addison-Wesley.
Byrne, D. (2001). Numeric keypad layout for text input (provisional title), University of York, Department of Computer Science, Third-year Project Report.
Detweiler, M. C., Schumacher, R. M. and Gattuso, N. L. (1990). Alphabetic input on a telephone keypad. in Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 34th Annual Meeting, pp. 212-216.
Draper, S. W. and Oatley, K. (1992). Action centred manuals or minimalist instruction? Alternative theories for Carroll's minimal manuals. (in) Computers and Writing, State of the Art. P. O. B. Holt and N. Williams (Eds.), Intellect Press: pp. 222-243.
Edwards, A. D. N. (1991). Speech Synthesis: Technology for disabled people. London: Paul Chapman.
Edwards, A. D. N., (Ed.) (1995). Extra-Ordinary Human-Computer Interaction: Interfaces for Users with Disabilities. Cambridge Series on Human-Computer Interaction. New York, Cambridge University Press.
*Edwards, A. D. N., Challis, B. P., Hankinson, J. C. K. and Pirie, F. L. (2000). Development of a standard test of musical ability for participants in auditory interface testing. (in) International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD 2000), P. R. Cook (Ed.) pp. 116-120, Atlanta, Georgia, International Community for Auditory Display.
* Edwards, A. D. N. and Li, Y. (2001). How many ways can you use one button? (submitted).
* Edwards, A. D. N. and Stevens, R. D. (1997). Visual dominance and the World-Wide Web. in Proceedings of the Sixth International World Wide Web Conference (CD-Rom), (Santa Clara, California), Stanford University.
Gardner, H. (1985). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. London:, Paladin.
Hankinson, J. C. K., Challis, B. P. and Edwards, A. D. N. (1999). MAT: A Tool For Measuring Musical Ability, Report YCS 322, University of York, Department of Computer Science, Technical Report
Hayward, R. (1997). Accessibility issues of Web browsers for blind people, University of York, Department of Computer Science, Final-year Project Report
Lee, J., Kim, J. and Moon, J. Y. (2000). What makes internet users visit cyber stores again? Key design factors for customer loyalty. (in) The Future is Here: Proceedings of Chi 2000, T. Turner, G. Szwillus, M. Czerwiniski and F. Paternò (Eds.) pp. 305-312, The Hague, NL, ACM Press Addison-Wesley,.
Li, Y. (2000). Timing data for the use of a single button, MSc(IP) Project Report, University of York, Department of Computer Science.
McLaughlin, B. (1997). A telephone keypad for alphanumeric input, University of York, Department of Computer Science, MSc (IP) Project report.
Newell, A. F., Arnott, J. L., Carter, K. and Cruikshank, G. (1990). Listening typewriter simulation studies. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 33: pp. 1-19.
Norman, D. A. (1998). The Invisible Computer : Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution, MIT Press.
Pirie, F. (1999). Implementation and evaluation of a proposed measure of musical ability for auditory interface testing, University of York, Department of Computer Science, MSc (IP) Project Report.
Pu, P. and Faltings, B. (2000). Enriching buyers' experiences: The Smartclient approach. (in) The Future is Here: Proceedings of Chi 2000, T. Turner, G. Szwillus, M. Czerwiniski and F. Paternò (Eds.) pp. 289-296, The Hague, NL, ACM Press Addison-Wesley.
Robson, C. (1994). Experiment, design and statistics in psychology. London:, Penguin Books Ltd.
Schwartz, R. L. (1993). Learning Perl. Sebastopol, California:, O'Reilly.
Sinclare, J. (1999). Rendering HTML tables non-visually for blind people, University of York, Department of Computer Science, Final-year student project report.
Travis, A. (2001). 'Britons grasp net and mobile phones', The Guardian, 24 January.
van Kemenade, H. (2000). Application of a methodology for the design of non-visual tables, University of York, Department of Computer Science, Final year student project report.
Weber, G. (1994). Braille displays. Information Technology and Disability 1(4).
Weber, G. (1995). Reading and pointing - New interaction methods for braille displays. in A. D. N. Edwards (ed.) Extra-ordinary Human-Computer Interaction: Interfaces for Users with Disabilities. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 183-200.
* Wloskowicz, D., Lukaszewicz, K. and Radecki, K. (1999). Implementation of synthetic speech in a phone communication system for deaf-mute people. Polish Journal of Medical Physiscs and Engineering 5(1): pp. 33-39.
* WWW6 (1997) Proceedings of the Sixth International World Wide Web Conference (CD-Rom), (Santa Clara, California), Stanford University.
This page maintained by Alistair Edwards alistair@cs.york.ac.uk
27th February 2001
Links updated 14th February 2002
http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~alistair/projects/projects.html