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 Authonomy invites unpublished and self published authors to post their manuscripts for visitors to read online.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.

I’ve been trying to get a survey paper published titled ‘Emerging Technologies and Web Accessibility: Research Challenges and Opportunities’ but to no avail. It seems it is not useful for accessibility - or the technical details are ’too’ technical; what have we come to. Anyhow I thought that I’d publish an extract here instead. This is a technological review article focused on identifying both the research challenges and opportunities for further investigation arising from emerging technologies.

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!

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.