A Scalable Solution For Automatically Generating Custom User
Interfaces For Users With Physical Disabilities
by
Krzysztof Gajos
A number of assistive technologies exist to address the needs of
users with most common physical disabilities: screen readers help
blind users, software "magnifying lenses" help those with poor
vision, while eye trackers, custom pointing devices and speech
recognition systems help users with limited motor control. A common
property of some of these solutions is that they address a single
disability at a time and often poorly combine with other assistive
technologies. For example, software "magnifying lenses" assume a
steady pointing device (like a mouse) but could be very hard to
control with an eye tracker because of small involuntary eye
movements. Furthermore, solutions like the magnifying lenses have a
small number of discrete settings, ignoring the fact that there is a
continuity of vision impairments. Finally, most of these solutions
are poorly integrated with the interfaces and consequently provide an
inefficient way to interact with the underlying applications. For
example, screen readers are unaware of visual hierarchies of elements
in dialog boxes. As another example, reducing screen resolution
enlarges all parts of an interface and not just those that were too
small to see clearly, thus wasting a lot of screen real estate.
The goal of our project is to develop a system that will
automatically generate user interfaces custom tailored to any
individual user's needs, taking into account combinations of
disabilities and various intermediate stages of those disabilities,
while enabling the most efficient interaction given the user's
abilities. To ensure scalability of our solution, we are developing
a toolkit that will allow care takers, consultants or even the
disabled users themselves to create a custom version of the system
best suited to their needs. In this talk I will lay out some of the
initial designs, explain the rationale for the project and solicit
your feedback.
This work is being done with Jing Jing Long and Daniel Weld.
CSE 403
Wednesday
April 12, 2006
9:30 - 10:20 pm