14th International Conference on Web Engineering ICWE 2014 I’m happy to say that Sukru got a nice trip to France to deliver our paper ‘Identifying Patterns in Eye-tracking Scan-paths in Terms of Visual Elements of Web Pages’ [1] at the 14th International Conference on Web Engineering ICWE 2014 [2]. In it we say that ‘Web pages are typically decorated with different kinds of visual elements that help sighted people complete their tasks.

Update: Draft paper now online. I told you that accessibility-in-use would start to become more accepted. Apparently the W4A Reviewers - a notoriously tough bunch - seem to agree as they’ve accepted our paper ‘Evaluating Accessibility-in-Use’ to the W4A 2013 Conference in Rio! This acceptance makes triple for our work (Hypertext 2013, Web Science 2013) on Coping strategies and behaviours - and the sets of Web tactics that are used to enact them.

Update 18 March 2013 - Paper now online. Humans are approximate creatures, we aren’t precise, and if this blog is anything to go by, we aren’t concise either! So then why do we persist in pursuing work which is ever more precise using tools which are sold on their precision. Eye-tracking is just one example of this - an individual gaze plot maybe precise, but start to add participants and you get gaze-spaghetti; nothing precise there.

Update 18 March 2013: Paper now available. First look at our recently accepted Hypertext 2013 paper! Little is known about the navigation tactics employed by screen reader users when they face problematic situations on the Web. Understanding how these tactics are operationalised and knowing the situations that bring about such tactics paves the way towards modeling navigation behaviour…. Modeling the navigation of users is of utmost importance as it allows not only to predict interactive behaviour, but also to assess the appropriateness of the content in a link, the information architecture of a site and the design of a web page.

Briefly, counting the number of visible edges on a web page is a good indicator of the perceived complexity of a web page. There is a lot more to it than this obviously… Ranking Scores from Manual and Computational Algorithm - Line The perception of the visual complexity of World Wide Web (Web) pages is a topic of significant interest. Previous work has examined the relationship between complexity and various aspects of presentation, including font styles, colours and images, but automatically quantifying this dimension of a web page at the level of the document remains a challenge.

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.

I wanted to call ourW4A paper ‘Define Accessibility!’ as both a challenge and a call, but I was overruled so it’s actually called ‘Understanding Web Accessibility and Its Drivers’. Here’s a sneaky peek at the abstract ahead of time! “Access is what the web is ‘about’, it is the motivation behind its creation, and it is the rationale behind HTML. The desire to pro­vide all users at CERN with the ability to access all documents was Tim Berners ­Lee’s primary goal, and this goal must also be carried through to equal access for all users.

One of my ‘A History of HCI in 15 Papers’* “ The Star system (circa 1980, and as described in Byte**[1]**) gave rise to five principles, which in my opinion, are so important and timeless that their formulation and practical application as part of the Xerox Star user interface was without doubt revolutionary.” The Xerox ‘Star’ was a commercial version of the prototypical Xerox Alto – if one thousand fully working systems, used internally at ‘PARC’ day-in-day-out over seven years, can be said to be prototypical.

“Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated. If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable.” Well I’m really heartened to see scientific debate progressing as it should do.

“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.

“This can only be useful work in the domain of blindness, situation impairment, and accessibility in that it may be possible to convey limited Web page information spatially, dynamically, and with a high degree of comprehension at seven (or nine) times faster because of the ability to comprehend highly parallel speech.”One of my ‘A History of HCI in 15 Papers’ It is unlikely that Colin Cherry1 realised the significance the community would place on the small five page paper he sent to the Acoustic Society of America in 1953 [1].

“How would you describe HCI in just research papers - and indeed, could you do this as a teachable unit?” Paris Observatory Astrolabe Inspired by the recent A History of the World in 100 Objects, it’s a simple idea, describe the last two million years of world history by focusing on 100 objects created in the time period from all over the world. Here’s one you may like: “The astrolabe was highly developed in the Islamic world by 800 and was introduced to Europe from Islamic Spain (Andalusia) in the early 12th century.

We did present at ASSETS 2010 as I previously said and I must say that I think this years conference was solid. Maybe the work presented was not completely within my frame of interest; indeed, there was Rehabilitation Engineering, Assistive Technology, Educational, and advocacy work there which are interesting but for me not directly relevant. However, there were a couple of papers that did in principle offer the promise (if not yet realised) of being transformative, and providing some good solid scientific understanding.

Roll-up, roll-up for our paper at the ‘12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility’, this year in Orlando Florida! We’ll - well Giorgio will - talk about expertise in the context of the testability and validity of WCAG 2.0: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) require that success criteria be tested by human inspection. Further, testability of WCAG 2.0 criteria is achieved if 80% of knowledgeable inspectors agree that the criteria has been met or not.

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.

This years conference focused on Developing Regions wishing to investigate accessibilities Common Goals and Common Problems1. The rationale was that the community thought that a revolution in the information society was starting, based on the use of mobile phones in developing countries. The hyper-growth of mobile phone penetration was deeply changing the lives of people in most of the world; their ways of communicating, working, learning, and structuring their societies.

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.

…but before I get on to that, a word or two about WWW2010. So this years Web Conference was an organisational triumph, great food1, great venue2, great location3, and great events4. Indeed, of this last the Carolina Chocolate Drops and, for me, their tune ‘Genuine Negro Jig’ was the highlight; an 18th century tune so powerful in melancholia it is at once both painful and absorbing. Back to work - my top three talks where: