Rediscovering Accessibility for Future Tech - Everyone is affected!
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The document discusses the evolving landscape of accessibility in an era of touchscreens, gestures, voice assistants, and other natural interfaces. As these technologies become mainstream, they introduce new accessibility challenges. Standards like WCAG and WAI-ARIA provide frameworks, but may need to be updated to address accessibility in contexts like mobile use and distracted environments. The lines between assistive and mainstream technologies are also blurring, requiring reexamination of approaches.
Rediscovering Accessibility for Future Tech - Everyone is affected!
- 1. Accessibility in the world of touch-screens and other natural interfaces Samir Dash 2014
- 2. Accessibility Ensuring a product/service that is equally functional to all users regardless of abilities or limitations.
- 3. With technology the assistive technologies are improving overtime. Possibly the next solution in assistive technology?
- 4. Catering to special needs of a visually disabled person through voice assistance + screen reader Its becoming a norm of having a smart assistance that can respond with results with support of voice input & output + inbuilt screen reader type tech. Lines between accessibility technology and Technology for Mass are getting blurred. Partially visually challenged person using magnified interface to be able to see bigger UI elements . Car-mode in mobile device presenting UI elements in a bigger sizes for usage while driving..
- 5. What used to be a special need is becoming a general need for mass use. No more point and click Touch screens gestures & Voice input No more the need to see to the display output Voice Assistants No more need to find manually Smart Assistants with predicative technology & machine learning
- 6. While driving a car I can not frequently see what is happening. Situational Disabilities Use-cases are defining the new age devices, wearable & smart interfaces Out of screen 3D gestures for person in motion. Solving input issues for a significantly smaller screen wearable.
- 7. Situational Disabilities Use-cases are defining the new age devices, wearable & smart interfaces While driving - solving the issue of controlling the device with gestures While driving- solving the issue of text input with smart voice integration
- 8. BEFORE NOW Accessibility issues have their roots in Usability issues in specific scenarios Accessibility Issues = Usability Issues As mass users devices are are getting affected Changing philosopy...
- 9. Welcome to the world of changing needs New challenges in implementation of accessibility for web content (?)
- 10. Web Accessibility Technologies & Practices • WCAG 2.0 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines • MWBP 1.0 Mobile Web Best Practices • WAI-ARIA Web Accessibility Initiative Accessible Rich Internet Applications
- 11. It’s a Common Sense The approach working for a situation ...
- 12. It’s a Common Sense ... may not work for another!
- 13. Nod seamlessly transforms your movements into commands. It brings the world around you to life, as you control everything from your laptop to your living room lights with a wave of your hand. Fin is a small wearable of its kind, a trendy gadget that you can wear on your thumb, which helps you to control your entire digital world
- 15. This is where we are heading… Source: https://realsenseappchallenge.intel.com
- 16. Future of our interfaces.. Looks Cool. Huh?
- 17. Really Cool?
- 18. The problem exponentially grow when special needs start define the main stream devices. When normal users start using special assistive technologies for normal usage and remove basic philosophies & frameworks in work till now, fall flat as the new production does not support .
- 19. BEFORE Normal PC, key inputs, display - main stream Gestures, voice – assistive alternatives Turing 180 degree! NOW Gestures, voice – main stream Normal PC, key-input , display - assistive alternative
- 20. Ethical or not, modern technologies are more enabling people to use HCIs to access web info in distracted environments, while in-motion and while multi-tasking giving raising to it’s own set of problems which were not known in PC era.
- 21. Web content being accessed by user is not the same form any more!
- 22. WCAG 2.0: Accessibility supported technologies Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0
- 23. MWBP 1.0: Started as an initiative to provide mapping between web2.0 rich content and Accessible Technology (AT) Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 Mostly focuses on: • Presentation of document structure • Dynamic content updates • Keyboard accessibility enhancements • Widget accessibility
- 24. Why Rethink& Improve? To answer these questions: • how normal people use new age interfaces/devices interfaces that are breaking age old display-input based systems. • How normal people use these in situational disabilities. • How disable people use these new age. • How disable people use these new age interfaces in situational disabilities.
- 25. “Mobile First” & “Gesture First” to Keyboard Designs that are driven by “mobile first” & “gestures first” kind of philosophy must think of accessibility in terms of 1. Alternative fall-backs : 1. Voice alternative ? Can I connect a keyboard and mouse? 2. Multi-touch/Gesture alternative? single handed support? single finger gesture ? gesture less input? 3. Can I connect a magnifier to the existing small screen? 4. Voice display less alternative? Display ? 2. Retaining the semantic meaning of change of medium 1. Information chunk with attributes like color, size, placement, form, shape with meaning needs to be translated meaningfully for new paradigms. 2. Contextual smartness needs to be translated to different forms.
- 26. Accessibility issues for new generation interfaces New genie in the bottle!
- 27. Visual cues of chunking of information makes communication effective and fast. Visual cues include spatial hierarchy of information. Moving to voice enabled system lacks this effectiveness. Voice based systems are linear. This is evident in normal screen reader or similar NLP supported translations.
- 28. Touch enabled display have their own problem to share. • Loss of tactile feedback • Lack of physical stability • Hard to select targets in un-optimized UI (viewport , content attribute)
- 29. Voice has been used popularly to solve input challenges in small-display or zero-display devices.
- 30. Add potato to my shopping list.. Sure. Tomato is added to your list. Noisy surrounding Voice based systems have their part of the stories! Localisation/accent issues Find paintings of last supper. Found one link for “last super hero”.
- 31. New age eco-system architectures also contribute to the new accessibilities issues. Search from my emails for Bob’s that has his contact number. Sorry. Can’t search. No internet connection available. Please connect to a network and try again. small display + small power + data in cloud
- 32. small display + small power + data in cloud + dependency on constant connectivity BEFORE NOW Map Data and the voice-over mechanism both are with in the device. Map Data and the voice-over mechanism both are in the cloud that can be accessed over network.
- 33. Please select your country: Armenia Bahrain Botswana Cameroun République Centrafricaine Côte d'Ivoire Egypt Guinea-Bissau Guinée Guinée Equatoriale India Israel Jordan Oman... UI translation to voice
- 34. UI translation to voice (with intelligence) with the understanding the semantic need what is your country name?
- 35. Too much Cognitive load in a display-less world ? • What is that number I just entered before 3 ? • Well what was the fifth option the system said? • I need to send the last email Bob has sent ?
- 36. Accessibility is impacted if the information gained in not effective. It makes it critical for us to understand that voice/NLP based systems are more being used in fast-moving environments, where speed and accuracy is important to make use of the information in a meaningful way. The new accessibility challenge is to retain “effectiveness”. 35 percent of U.S. drivers admit to texting behind the wheel. Young drivers 18 to 29 blew that number away with a whopping 70 percent.
- 37. You need someone to assist you intelligently! • Predict user intention/need • Understand semantically • Understand the context of usage • Provide usage models that is effective to the context
- 38. Everyone is being affected! Need to change business models now based on accessibility! Online Ad companies will have to come up with new ad serving frameworks. • How Google Ad will come on a pure voice enabled environment? • How Amazon will show ads while you browse a third party site over a gesture controlled small screen like a watch ? • Or a over a brain to brain interface? A SUPER CRACK IDEA!!! Can we play a voice based ad like we do in music sites while the user is accessing his emails over NLP ? What about priority and criticality of user needs!
- 39. Everyone is being affected! New definition of “responsiveness” of web! In a display less world the web page has to be responsive in a new dimension of rendering it. In a display enabled world the verity will be more with minimal screens and rest getting translated into other mediums like voice. So all existing responsiveness and related frameworks have to be updated.
- 40. Everyone is being affected! No more pure screen reader business ! It’s business about smart assistants only! Dumb screen readers depending on tab index, may not be potential help, rather more smart assistants are the way to go.
- 41. Everyone is being affected! Opportunity? Make the web-content/apps intelligent enough for the new devices and make it accessible in a safer way!. Without waiting for the smart devices and smart technologies to solve new accessibility issues, we need to have our information system intelligent too! How about optimising Yahoo/Gmail interfaces for driving mode? 35 percent of U.S. drivers admit to texting behind the wheel. Young drivers 18 to 29 blew that number away with a whopping 70 percent.
- 42. But this will take time and how to predict the specs of future HCI revolutions? How to future-proof ‘now’ ?
- 43. WAI-ARIA luckily we have the bridge to future with us. WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications) is a technical specification published by the World Wide Web Consortium that specifies how to increase the accessibility of web pages, in particular, dynamic content and user interface components developed with Ajax, HTML, JavaScript and related technologies. As of March 2014, it was a Recommendation
- 44. Assistive Technology Web content WAI-ARIA started as an initiative to provide mapping between web2.0 rich content and Accessible Technology (AT) Presentation of document structure Dynamic content updates Keyboard accessibility enhancements Widget accessibility
- 45. Diversity in the evolution of HCI can be tackled through API based framework approach WAI-ARIA Accessibility features across browsers have improved over time.
- 46. The WAI-ARIA approach : the flexible stop-gap approach designed for system evolution It all started to plug the hole in HTML4 (or any other mark-up language) to help web applications and web pages to be made more accessible. The ARIA specs says “It is expected that over time, host language will evolve to provide semantics for objects that previously could only be declared with WAI-ARIA. When native semantics for a given feature become available, it is appropriate for authors to use the native feature and stop using WAI-ARIA for that feature” Aria supported custom object <div role=“heading” aria-level=“ 2”> I am a heading </div> Native object <h2>I am heading</h2>
- 47. Future Assistive technologies Past & present assistive technologies. WAI-ARIA can act as a bridge to future. Though it has to transcend beyond just web content / mark-up over time.
- 48. Thanks. I am accessible. mobilewish@gmail.com http://samirshomepage.wordpress.com http://in.linkedin.com/in/mobilewish http://www.behance.net/mobilewish http://www.slideshare.net/MobileWish http://www.youtube.com/user/mobilewish#play/uploads http://samirshomepage.wordpress.com/feed/ http://twitter.com/mobilewish https://plus.google.com/+SamirDash-mobilewish/posts http://www.facebook.com/people/Samir-K-Dash/1046301826 ess_samir Special thanks and credit goes to the copyright holders of some images used in this preso.