Well I’m finally back from ASSETS and the jet lag is disappearing. While ASSETS allocates the official Best Paper prizes most years I disagree. This year is no exception and for me the best paper - and science at ASSETS 2012 was ‘Evaluation of dynamic image pre-compensation for computer users with severe refractive error’ Armando Barreto This paper was authored by Jian Huang, Armando Barreto, and Malek Adjouadi and was presented by Armando Barreto.

Friday, October 5 2012 marked the one-year anniversary of the passing of Steve Jobs, Apple’s visionary CEO that brought the iPod, iPhone, iPad and a bevy of other devices into the world. Jobs and Apple essentially jump-started the smart-phone revolution, and that revolution has been very useful for the accessibility community. What Now for Accessibility at Apple? Last year I voiced my concerns that Accessibility may be left to degrade (especially if the accountants took over) but maybe I was wrong.

Our analysis shows that for the most popular 500 sites, JavaScript is used in 93%, Flash in 27% and about one-third (30%) use XMLHttpRequest, a technology used to generate dynamic updates. Uptake of XMLHttpRequest is approximately 2.3% per year across a random selection of 500 sites and is probably higher in the most popular sites. So, when examining dynamic updates from the perspective of visually disabled users, evidence suggests that, at best, most users can currently reach updated content, but they must do so manually, and are rarely given any automated indication that any update has occurred.

Or rather - “A cross-disciplinary approach to identifying requirements for an online health and social support system for people with lung cancer”. This was our submission to the ACM ASSETS 2012 Conference, but unfortunately was rejected - to some extent because it didn’t fit a limited -in my opinion- view of the definition of accessibility and its link with disability. Our abstract asserts that people with lung cancer have reduced access to peer support due to situational and combinatorial impairments (including those related to ageing).

Web accessibility metrics are an invaluable tool for researchers, developers, governmental agencies and end users. Accessibility metrics help indicate the accessibility level of websites, including the accessibility level of individual websites, or even large-scale surveys of the accessibility of many websites. Recently, a plethora of metrics has been released to complement the A, AA, and AAA Levels measurement used by the WAI guidelines. However, the validity and reliability of most of these metrics are unknown and those making use of them are taking the risk of using inappropriate metrics.

We undertook a study of validity and reliability of WCAG 2.0 and found that an 80% target for agreement is not attainable, when audits are conducted without communication between evaluators. Even with experienced evaluators the error rate is relatively high; and further, untrained accessibility auditors -be they developers or quality testers from other domains- do much worse than this. Read the full published text via ACM Author-izer Open Access on the publications page.

The last year has been an exciting one for SIGWEB. From the sponsorship of the large Web Science Conference, to that of the small Social Network Working Group; from the increase in student travel sponsorship (to $25,000pa), to our increasing volunteer effort; the SIG has been at work at all levels of our domain. We have forged links with multiple (≈20) conferences and workshops across our field, building a better website for our members, changing our bylaws to cement our relationship with our conferences, while still maintaining our low membership dues.

‘Caring for a person with Alzheimer’s can feel like a prison term spent in solitary confinement.’ Gran & Grandad (circa 1975) Carers for people with Alzhimer’s are faced with five key problems: - **Technological Disenfranchisement** carers of people with Alzheimer’s are normally their spouse or partner and are therefore of the same approximate age as the cared-for. This means that the carer has the associated disenfranchisement with: technology, computers, the Web, and digital-life in general, as would be expected of any senior citizen; - **Isolation** people with Alzheimer’s become increasingly dependent on their carer.

Another innovative feature of this years W4A was the W4ACamp help on the newly instigated ‘Crazy Wednesday’. I’m happy to say we lived up to the spirit of the day, meeting in a hotel bar at 09:30-12:30 and running impromptu attendee led discussions while stealing network, and being fuelled on coffee from the hotel staff! As it happened the the camp split into four, with a number of people switching between groups half way through - after 1h30m.

‘I find the sentiment within this book to be important in that the experience of the user, their enjoyment, their delight, and thedeliciousness (the Umami) of the software or application are often forgotten or ignored in a headlong rush to implement accessibility, usability, and inclusion. Indeed this enjoyment aspect goes into my current thinking on the practice of interface and interaction engineering within the software engineering domain.’ Funology, is a difficult book to read because the majority of chapters are so very certain over the theories and frameworks they present, seemingly without any direct scientific support.

Grrrrr! Philosophical debates drive me wild when they are part of a paper review! Now my view / assertion is that we don’t need mobile only sites - just mobile friendly ones - and creating them will build us a mobile ghetto much like the old accessibility only sites from the bad old days of Web Accessibility. **** You don’t need to believe me - I argue from the point of Websites, browsers, and users.

“The key aspect of this work is not the extent of the studies - using hundreds of participants for one specific protocol - but the combination of three experimental protocols coupled with small user groups.”One of my ‘A History of HCI in 15 Papers’ Paul M Fitts seminal work “The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement” **[1]**does exactly what a good human factors paper should.

What I hear you cry, “single user studies can’t be valid, even ethnography’s have more than one user”. Well that’s what I was saying before reading Dix 2010 [1] which I covered last week. The critical thing that Dix sees as different is that - and I’m paraphrasing and using my own terms here - single user studies can be used to scope extent as opposed to our normal desire to support a point via a measure of magnitude of similarity across users; as a way of discovering out-layers as opposed to those which look like harmonise sample data; and as a way of disproving the rule which all the other sample data seems to support.

One of my ‘A History of HCI in 15 Papers’* The January 2010 issue of Interacting with Computers (Volume 22 Issue 1 / http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intcom.2009.11.005) is a Festschrift Special Issue for John Long. This is a special issue dedicated to John because, as the editors (Alistair Sutcliffe and Ann Blandford) say: John Long is one of the founders of our discipline in the UK and contributed significantly to the emergence of HCI in the international arena.

This year’s W4A will fast be upon us. Accommodation has been booked, travel has been finalised, tickets have been bought, and suitcases are about to be packed for the annual Web accessibility conference, a conference I enjoy the most. In the spirit of anticipation I decided to look through the Provisional Programme offered this year to see if there are any interesting papers which looked a little different from usual.

I’ve recently been arguing ideology with a reviewer of one of my papers. It’s quite strange that we don’t seem to do this much in HF and so I think we get pretty rusty - and resort to flame based shouting. In reality I’m not sure how much ideology should come into play when we talk about science - the scientific method should insulate us from most of this. But as humans we are fallible and so maybe a good argument means that we can change the way we think about ideas we have held sacrosanct for so long.

We use the term ‘Computational Thinking’ in one of our visit day slides - the day prospective students come the School to find out more and get their offer - but we don’t really go into it in any more detail on the Website or explicitly in the Undergraduate Programme; as far as I’m aware. It was hot a year or so ago but in reality I never saw the point, it seemed obvious or as though Computer Scientists wanted to cling to this all encompassing concept - think the Web Science ‘Flower’ - to justify our interdisciplinary existence.

Seems to me like the new work in information management is social aggregation. It also seems like that thorny problem of information overload is now being applied to social networks as the number of presences an individual has increase to un-manageability. Aggregation seems to be the answer to some - with Sony Ericsson’s Timescape and Mediascape, Spindex, and applications like the Moblin/ Maemo / MeeGo aggregator seeming to provide a solution - but as we already know cognitive overload is a critical problem when navigating large information resources, aggregated or not.

I’ve noticed a spate of ‘Bush-bashing’ as of late! NO, I don’t mean George or George W. I mean the man Vannevar. From the panel session at HT2010 to Mark Bernstein’s blog to the Paul De Bra’s recent unKeynote at Web Art Science and general ascent from various audience members - indeed, I think Dave Millard and Alan Dix also agree with Mark and Paul’s observations. There seems to be two general assertions: firstly that Bush does not propose Hypertext because Hypertext as Ted Nelson sees it (and therefore we see it) is different, and secondly that ‘As We May Think’ was such ‘popular science’ - getting ‘predictions’ both right and wrong - as to render it nearer to fiction such as Murray Leinster’s 1946 short story, “A Logic Name Joe” or H.

Authonomy is a unique online community that connects readers, writers and publishing professionals. It was conceived and built by editors at HarperCollins Publishers. They are in ‘beta’ at the moment, so they’re still developing and perfecting the site. Authonomy invites unpublished and self published authors to post their manuscripts for visitors to read online. Authors create their own personal page on the site to host their project - and must make at least 10,000 words available for the public to read.

Wordpress sent over the descriptive states for last year for ‘Thinking Out Load’ , and formulated a high level summary of its overall blog health: The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever. Crunchy numbers A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 3,000 times in 2010. That’s about 7 full 747s. In 2010, there were 31 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 62 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 43mb.

Well first off, let’s say goodbye to 2010 and welcome in 2011 - I’m sure Time Square will be as crowded as it was in the 1950’s - different but the same! Now lets look at research funding [1] - I think this can be equally applied to paper acceptance rates - in the hope of a better funded 2011! Current thought seems to be that 30% is about the right level of acceptance for funding.

As a positivist research scientist I’ve been struggling with the whole User Experience (UX) space for a long time, because to me it just seems a bit - well - ‘fluffy’. Many people seem to have got to grips with it, including Rui Lopes (see his recent blog articles) but to me, the more I read about the subject the more I think it is fine for evaluating specific interfaces but that the results cannot be generalised.

So I recently attended the Web, Art, Science Un-conference / Camp and I must say it was pretty good. While it was a small affair attracting about 35 participants, the bulk being Web Scientists from Southampton, it was refreshing to see different literary work and analysis in a scientific context. I’d say that for the next one a greater effort needs to be made to attract practising artists and writers as opposed to scientist and academics studying literature.

Mark Lombardi was a transformational hypertext artist - well at least - he is to me. But maybe even he didn’t know this because he never used the machinery of hypertext but looking at this art, to me, we can see that it really is hypertext. But the great transformational aspects of the work is the movement of his global networks of conspiratorial relationships from what could have turned into a dry preaching report to an art form immediately accessible and viable to all.

Noah Mendelsohn (an IBM Distinguished Engineer) defines Decentralized Extensibility (DE) in HTML5 as: “The ability for a language to be extended by multiple parties who do not explicitly coordinate with each other.” The rationale for DE is that: “The Web is too big for any central group to invent or cooordinate all needed extensions to languages like HTML” Indeed, HTML5 supports DE: “When vendor-neutral extensions to this specification are needed, either this specification can be updated accordingly, or an extension specification can be written that overrides the requirements in this specification.

I recently came across a paper discussing the evaluation of user interface systems. In it the author proposes that complex user interface systems and architectures do not readily yield to the research methods we currently use. It was at this point I started to bristle with derision in a very defensive “I’m a research scientist and the scientific method says that we must have objective measures to express an accurate understanding!

Interesting ideas coming from the Model-Based UI XG W3C Incubator Group with their Final Report of 04 May 2010 proposing model driven approaches to Web interface creation, and Web application Interaction. Within the Web Ergonomics domain I’m particularly interested in the sections on user modelling [1] via the use of an ontology [2]. Now while I think this particular approach shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the ways in which ontologies are used within the semantic Web and Description Logic communities; mainly because they seem to want to try and model an individual user as opposed to a generic type of user.

One of my ‘A History of HCI in 15 Papers’ Models of the user have existed in HCI for a number of years. Some of the first where developed by Miller in an attempt to apply information theory to the human. Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and electrical engineering involving the quantification of information. Historically, information theory was developed by Shannon to find fundamental limits on signal processing operations such as compressing data and on reliably storing and communicating data.

According to the BBC News certain ‘Ancient’ and ‘Red Brick’ Universities in the UK want to raise student tuition fees above the current £3,225-a-year. In some cases the sum of £9,000 per year has been suggested. The Russell Group comprises: - [University of Birmingham](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Birmingham) - [University of Bristol](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Bristol) - [University of Cambridge](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Cambridge) - [Cardiff University](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiff_University) - [University of Edinburgh](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Edinburgh) - [University of Glasgow](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Glasgow) - [Imperial College London](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_College_London) - [King's College London](http://en.