Computer Sciences Commons^™

Maximizing Data Optimization: Analysis, Retention, And Website Accessibility, Selena Cade

Culminating Experience Projects

As a graduate assistant at Grand Valley, there is significant involvement with a program that assists middle and high school students with learning about college. As a preface, the information presented in this document will remain anonymous and confidential for the program's benefit.

Students receive a campus tour, eat at the dining halls, and obtain information about college. Before students arrive, a pre-visit survey is sent to gauge their college knowledge. After the visit, a post-visit survey with the same questions is sent out to determine if they gained more knowledge. This data has rarely been viewed in the past …

Implementing Impact: A Lesson On Mysql Databases And Accessibility, Abigayle Peterson, Yasmine Elglaly

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

15% of the world’s people have a disability that could potentially hinder their access to digital information such as bank portals and medical insurance. Digital accessibility, the practice of creating user-friendly technology, helps mitigate these challenges. Despite this fact, college Computer Science (CS) programs fail to recognize the importance of including digital accessibility courses as a degree requirement. Consequently, these CS graduates lack sufficient knowledge to build accessible software when they enter the technology industry, leading to potential company lawsuits for the unethical design of technology. Our research aims to bridge the gap between accessibility knowledge and the CS college …

Toying With Adapted Toys, Joshua King

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

My project is a design for an adapted toy that occupational therapists (OT) can use when working with kids. OTs are people who help others to be able to do daily tasks that they need to do to live their lives. This can look like helping a person who has been injured or has a disability to accomplish tasks like getting dressed or feeding themselves. It can also involve helping school children to improve their writing or to use assistive technology. My project started out as an idea from my mom who is an OT and was using a coffee …

Accessible Autonomy: Exploring Inclusive Autonomous Vehicle Design And Interaction For People Who Are Blind And Visually Impaired, Paul D. S. Fink

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Autonomous vehicles are poised to revolutionize independent travel for millions of people experiencing transportation-limiting visual impairments worldwide. However, the current trajectory of automotive technology is rife with roadblocks to accessible interaction and inclusion for this demographic. Inaccessible (visually dependent) interfaces and lack of information access throughout the trip are surmountable, yet nevertheless critical barriers to this potentially lifechanging technology. To address these challenges, the programmatic dissertation research presented here includes ten studies, three published papers, and three submitted papers in high impact outlets that together address accessibility across the complete trip of transportation. The first paper began with a thorough …

The Use Of Artificial Intelligence In Higher Education: A Study On Faculty Perspectives In Universities In Egypt, Farah S. Sharawy

Theses and Dissertations

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an emerging technology that is transforming various aspects of society, including higher education. This paper examines faculty perspectives from five different institutions; The American University in Cairo (AUC), The German University in Cairo (GUC), The Arab Academy for Science and Technology (AAST), Ain Shams University, and Cairo University, on the use of AI in higher education in teaching and learning in Egypt, with all its challenges and resources available to support it, and how it can be used to achieve equity and accessibility. This research was conducted through a qualitative study using semi-structured one- on-one interviews …

The State Of Accessibility In Blackboard: Survey And User Reviews Case Study, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Wajdi Aljedaani, Stephanie Ludi, Mohammed Alkahtani, Marcelo M. Eler, Marouane Kessentini, Ali Ouni

Articles

Context: Nowadays, mobile applications (or apps) have become vital in our daily life, particularly within education. Many institutions increasingly rely on mobile apps to provide access to all their students. However, many education mobile apps remain inaccessible to users with disabilities who need to utilize accessibility features like talkback or screen reader features. Accessibility features have to be considered in mobile apps to foster equity and inclusion in the educational environment allowing to use of such apps without limitations. Gaps in the accessibility to educational systems persist.

Objective: In this paper, we focus on the accessibility of the Blackboard mobile …

Supporting Novices Author Audio Descriptions Via Automatic Feedback, Rosiana Natalie, Joshua Tseng, Hernisa Kacorri, Kotaro Hara

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Audio descriptions (AD) make videos accessible to those who cannot see them. But many videos lack AD and remain inaccessible as traditional approaches involve expensive professional production. We aim to lower production costs by involving novices in this process. We present an AD authoring system that supports novices to write scene descriptions (SD)—textual descriptions of video scenes—and convert them into AD via text-to-speech. The system combines video scene recognition and natural language processing to review novice-written SD and feeds back what to mention automatically. To assess the effectiveness of this automatic feedback in supporting novices, we recruited 60 participants to …

Supporting Novices Author Audio Descriptions Via Automatic Feedback, Rosiana Natalie, Joshua Tseng, Hernisa Kacorri, Kotaro Hara

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Audio descriptions (AD) make videos accessible to those who cannot see them. But many videos lack AD and remain inaccessible as traditional approaches involve expensive professional production. We aim to lower production costs by involving novices in this process. We present an AD authoring system that supports novices to write scene descriptions (SD) - textual descriptions of video scenes - and convert them into AD via text-to-speech. The system combines video scene recognition and natural language processing to review novice-written SD and feeds back what to mention automatically. To assess the effectiveness of this automatic feedback in supporting novices, we …

Flextype: Flexible Text Input With A Small Set Of Input Gestures, Dylan Gaines, Mackenzie M. Baker, Keith Vertanen

Michigan Tech Publications

In many situations, it may be impractical or impossible to enter text by selecting precise locations on a physical or touchscreen keyboard. We present an ambiguous keyboard with four character groups that has potential applications for eyes-free text entry, as well as text entry using a single switch or a brain-computer interface. We develop a procedure for optimizing these character groupings based on a disambiguation algorithm that leverages a long-span language model. We produce both alphabetically-constrained and unconstrained character groups in an offline optimization experiment and compare them in a longitudinal user study. Our results did not show a significant …

Survey On Outdoor Navigation Applications For People With Visual Impairment, Fatmaelzahraa Eltaher, Luis Miralles-Pechuán, Jane Courtney, Susan Mckeever

Datasets

Outdoor navigation is a very challenging activity for People who suffer from Blindness or Visually Impairment (PBVI). Having examined the current literature, we conclude that there are very few publications providing a nuanced understanding of how PBVI undertake a journey in an outdoor environment and what their main challenges and obstacles are. To throw some light on this gap, we conducted a questionnaire in collaboration with the National Council for the Blind Ireland (NCBI) for 49 PBVI. Our questionnaire gathers information about key aspects related to PBVI outdoor navigation such as support tools/devices, hazards, journey preparation, crossing roads, and understanding …

Building Coleus Academy, Janessa Unseld

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Coleus Academy, a nonprofit e-learning platform, has been created to address the deficits left by the de-emphasis and, at times, outright omission of practical skill-centric education in American curriculums. There exists a gap between the degree of knowledge necessary to engage with adult life and the extent of that knowledge that is actually possessed by emerging adults. Prominent legislations are among the numerous efforts to address this issue. However, there is a deeply fractured market where resources are proving too expensive, too sparse, or hyper-specific to the point of limited usability. Compounded with disparities in when, where, and to whom …

An Ambiguous Technique For Nonvisual Text Entry, Dylan C. Gaines

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Text entry is a common daily task for many people, but it can be a challenge for people with visual impairments when using virtual touchscreen keyboards that lack physical key boundaries. In this thesis, we investigate using a small number of gestures to select from groups of characters to remove most or all dependence on touch locations. We leverage a predictive language model to select the most likely characters from the selected groups once a user completes each word.

Using a preliminary interface with six groups of characters based on a Qwerty keyboard, we find that users are able to …

Enhancing Health Data Representation For Older Adults: Unlocking Opportunities, Peterson Jean

Academic Posters Collection

The prevalence of off-the-shelf wearable devices increases the monitoring and measurement of critical physiological parameters like activity, sleep, heart rate, and blood pressure. However, the accessibility of health data representations poses challenges for older adults, who often struggle to understand the criticality of their own health data without assistance. This poster highlights the challenges older adults face in accessing their health data from wearable technologies, specifically focusing on data representations.

To address these challenges, it proposes a methodology that involves a heuristic evaluation of existing data representations with experts and accessibility studies with older adults using a mixed methods approach …

Detecting Deceptive Dark-Pattern Web Advertisements For Blind Screen-Reader Users, Satwick Ram Kodandaram, Mohan Sunkara, Sampath Jayarathna, Vikas Ashok

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Advertisements have become commonplace on modern websites. While ads are typically designed for visual consumption, it is unclear how they affect blind users who interact with the ads using a screen reader. Existing research studies on non-visual web interaction predominantly focus on general web browsing; the specific impact of extraneous ad content on blind users' experience remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we conducted an interview study with 18 blind participants; we found that blind users are often deceived by ads that contextually blend in with the surrounding web page content. While ad blockers can address this problem via …

Investigating Accessibility Challenges And Opportunities For Users With Low Vision Disabilities In Customer-To-Customer (C2c) Marketplaces, Bektur Ryskeldiev, Kotaro Hara, Mariko Kobayashi, Koki Kusano

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Inaccessible e-commerce websites and mobile applications exclude people with visual impairments (PVI) from online shopping. Customer-to-customer (C2C) marketplaces, a form of e-commerce where trading happens not between businesses and customers but between customers, could pose a unique set of challenges in the interactions that the platform brings about. Through online questionnaire and remote interviews, we investigate problems experienced by people with low vision disabilities in common C2C scenarios. Our study with low vision participants (N = 12) reveal both previously known general accessibility issues (e.g., web and mobile interface accessibility) and C2C specific accessibility issues (e.g., inability to confirm item …

Designing And Evaluating Accessible E-Learning For Students With Visual Impairments In K-12 Computing Education, Earl W. Huff Jr

All Dissertations

This dissertation explores the pathways for making K-12 computing education more accessible for blind or visually impaired (BVI) learners. As computer science (CS) expands into K-12 education, more concerted efforts are required to ensure all students have equitable access to opportunities to pursue a career in computing. To determine their viability with BVI learners, I conducted three studies to assess current accessibility in CS curricula, materials, and learning environments. Study one was interviews with visually impaired developers; study two was interviews with K-12 teachers of visually impaired students; study three was a remote observation within a computer science course. My …

Exploring Methods Of Collecting Accessibility Feedback, Selah Bellscheidt

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Accessibility, the practice of making a website or application easily usable and understandable by people with disabilities, is essential to ensuring that all users are able to participate equally in using the Web. However, currently many websites have accessibility issues. This study interviews 11 software developers and designers to learn about the methods that they use to collect accessibility feedback during the development and maintenance of websites and mobile applications. The research revealed a lack of standardized accessibility education at the post-secondary level, as well as a myriad of methods used to obtain accessibility feedback from automatic accessibility checkers to …

Website Accessibility Strategies, Gary W. Hrezo

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Most websites cannot be readily used by people with disabilities, despite the internet being an essential component for people to be part of a community. Applying web accessibility strategies means that people with disabilities can better interact with the web. Grounded in Davis’s technology acceptance model, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to examine strategies used by web designers to make websites accessible for people with disabilities. The participants were experienced web developers from organizations in Florida with websites that have a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Level 2 of three levels, i.e., AA- rating. The data collection …

Visionary Caption: Improving The Accessibility Of Presentation Slides Through Highlighting Visualization, Carmen Ji Yan Yip, Jie Mi Chong, Sin Yee Kwek, Yong Wang, Kotaro Hara

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Presentation slides are widely used in occasions such as academic talks and business meetings. Captions placed on slides support deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people to understand spoken contents, but simultaneously comprehending and associating visual contents on slides and caption text could be challenging. In this paper, we design and develop a visualization technique to highlight and associate chart on a slide and numerical data in caption. We first conduct a small formative study with people with and without hearing impairments to assess the value of the visualization technique using a lo-fidelity video prototype. We then develop Visionary Caption, …

The Efficacy Of Collaborative Authoring Of Video Scene Descriptions, Rosiana Natalie, Jolene Kar Inn Loh, Huei Suen Tan, Joshua Shi-Hao Tseng, Ian Luke Yi-Ren Chan, Ebrima H. Jarjue, Hernisa Kacorri, Kotaro Hara

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The majority of online video contents remain inaccessible to people with visual impairments due to the lack of audio descriptions to depict the video scenes. Content creators have traditionally relied on professionals to author audio descriptions, but their service is costly and not readily-available. We investigate the feasibility of creating more cost-effective audio descriptions that are also of high quality by involving novices. Specifically, we designed, developed, and evaluated ViScene, a web-based collaborative audio description authoring tool that enables a sighted novice author and a reviewer either sighted or blind to interact and contribute to scene descriptions (SDs)—text that can …

Finding The Needle In A Haystack: On The Automatic Identification Of Accessibility User Reviews, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Wajdi Aljedaani, Murtaza Tamjeed, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Yasime Elglaly

Articles

In recent years, mobile accessibility has become an important trend with the goal of allowing all users the possibility of using any app without many limitations. User reviews include insights that are useful for app evolution. However, with the increase in the amount of received reviews, manually analyzing them is tedious and time-consuming, especially when searching for accessibility reviews. The goal of this paper is to support the automated identification of accessibility in user reviews, to help technology professionals in prioritizing their handling, and thus, creating more inclusive apps. Particularly, we design a model that takes as input accessibility user …

Towards Location-Independent Eyes-Free Text Entry, Dylan C. Gaines

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

We propose an interface for eyes-free text entry using an ambiguous technique and conduct a preliminary user study. We find that user are able to enter text at 19.09 words per minute (WPM) with a 2.08% character error rate (CER) after eight hours of practice. We explore ways to optimize the ambiguous groupings to reduce the number of disambiguation errors, both with and without familiarity constraints. We find that it is feasible to reduce the number of ambiguous groups from six to four. Finally, we explore a technique for presenting word suggestions to users using simultaneous audio feedback. We find …

Exploring User Interface Improvements For Software Developers Who Are Blind, Guarionex J. Salivia, Flint D. Million, Megan E. Bening

Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities

Software developers who are blind and interact with the computer non-visually face unique challenges with information retrieval. We explore the use of speech and Braille combined with software to provide an improved interface to aid with challenges associated with information retrieval. We motivate our design on common tasks performed by students in a software development course using a Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages (MIPS) architecture simulation tool. We test our interface via a single-subject longitudinal study, and we measure and show improvement in both the user’s performance and the user experience.

Connecting The Dots For People With Autism: A Data-Driven Approach To Designing And Evaluating A Global Filter, Viseth Sean

Computational and Data Sciences (PhD) Dissertations

"Social communication is the use of language in social contexts. It encompasses social interaction, social cognition, pragmatics, and language processing” [3]. One presumed prerequisite of social communication is visual attention–the focus of this work. “Visual attention is a process that directs a tiny fraction of the information arriving at primary visual cortex to high-level centers involved in visual working memory and pattern recognition” [7]. This process involves the integration of two streams: the global and local streams; the global stream rapidly processes the scene, and the local stream processes details. This integration is important to social communication in that attending …

Wayfinder Application For Autistic Occupational Assistance, Nathaniel Edward Hishon

Master's Theses

Employment among autistic individuals is an area of noted difficulty, with an employment rate well below the general population [1]. Several barriers attributed to autistic unemployment, including difficulties communicating with employers and social interactions with coworkers, obsessive adherence to routine, and trouble organizing and completing workplace tasks, are also attributed to challenges in maintaining employment [2]. Several studies have concluded that long-term employment support is necessary to acquire and maintain autistic employment [3]. The noted benefit of intensive job training, such as access to job coaches, indicates the need for further support to help autistic individuals complete workplace tasks and …

Accessibility: The Whys And The Hows, Devorah Kletenik

Open Educational Resources

This presentation introduces Computer Science students to the notion of accessibility: developing software for people with disabilities. This lesson provides a discussion of why accessibility is important (including the legal, societal and ethical benefits) as well as an overview of different types of impairments (visual, auditory, motor, neurological/cognitive) and how developers can make their software accessible to users with those disabilities. This lesson includes videos and links to readings and tutorials for students.

Accessibility Evaluation, Devorah Kletenik

Open Educational Resources

This activity guides students through the evaluation of a website that they have created to see if it is accessible for users with disabilities. Students will simulate a number of different disabilities (e.g. visual impairments, color blindness, auditory impairments, motor impairments) to see if their website is accessible; they will also use automated W3 and WAVE tools to evaluate their sites. Students will consider the needs of users with disabilities by creating a persona and scenario of a user with disabilities interacting with their site. Finally, students will write up recommendations to change their site and implement the changes.

Stylized 2d Fabrication Of Non-Photorealistic Images, Athina Panotopoulou

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

A current trend in computer graphics is the use of programmable tools that allow non-experts to engage in the design of physical prototypes. Within fabrication, one area of research focuses on non-photorealistic images which are stylized to depict a particular aesthetic quality or convey key information. In cases where authenticity is demanded or the images need to be manipulated, fabrication is necessary. Non-photorealistic image fabrication involves two challenges: identifying and abstracting key information during design and considering material restrictions during fabrication. This thesis showcases two examples for fabricating new types of non-photorealistic images, the first involving watercolors, and the second …

Testing And Improving An Optimization-Based Digital Colorblindness Corrective Filter, Zachary Kenneth Mcintyre

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Computers often communicate essential information via color which is lost to colorblind users. In order to address this information loss, designers and computer scientists have created a variety of different correction methods to improve computer accessibility. One such method was created by Luke Jefferson and Richard Harvey in their 2006 paper, “Accommodating Color Blind Computer Users” which consists of a difference histogram, differences of key colors, optimization and interpolation to adjust images for specific types of congenital colorblindness. I have recreated their algorithm as well as their original test images. I then conducted extensive tests on challenging images to examine …

Virtual Reality Accessibility With Predictive Trails, Dani Paul Hove

Honors Projects

Comfortable locomotion in VR is an evolving problem. Given the high probability of vestibular-visual disconnect, and subsequent simulator sickness, new users face an uphill battle in adjusting to the technology. While natural locomotion offers the least chance of simulator sickness, the space, economic and accessibility barriers to it limit its effectiveness for a wider audience. Software-enabled locomotion circumvents much of these barriers, but has the greatest need for simulator sickness mitigation. This is especially true for standing VR experiences, where sex-biased differences in mitigation effectiveness are amplified (postural instability due to vection disproportionately affects women).

Predictive trails were developed as …