Catalogue Entry – Adaptive Web-Interfaces DRAFT

Title:

Adaptive Web-Interfaces

Editor(s):

Categorization and Tags:

Adaptive User Interfaces, Web Accessibility

Description:

A lot of research has been done to improve the accessibility of web content for people with sensory, motor or cognitive impairments. In parallel to that improvement in quality and availability of assistive technology that support disabled has been made. Therefor authors of web content are able to create dynamic web pages that are accessible and usable by all when using state of the art accessibility techniques. To further improve the experience of disabled people when using the web content should dynamically change to suit the user’s needs and preferences. Interfaces that realize this are defined as “Adaptive User Interfaces (AUI)”. An AUI adapts its layout, structure or content to the needs of the user or context and is similarly alterable by each user. The advantages of an adaptive user interface are found within its ability to create a user interface that is optimized to the current user’s needs and preferences. Only relevant information is shown and presented in the best possible way to the user. This creates less confusion for less experienced users and provides ease of access throughout a system.

Background and State-of-the-art:

Adaptive User Interfaces can provide enhancement in usability and accessibility for all people and especially people with disabilities. People with cognitive disabilities can benefit from information and content presented in a way they are familiar and comfortable with. Content might be displayed in EasyToRead format or enriched with symbols so that the content is easier to understand for people with cognitive disabilities. Many people who are deaf since birth have difficulties with written language due to the completely different grammar of sign language, information represented in written language can be communicated in a for the user more natural way, like sign language or pictograms. Visually impaired often struggle with the navigation and orientation on web pages when surfing the internet. Therefore AUI would provide interfaces that offer improved and optimized navigation mechanisms especially tailored for the current user. Also people with physical impairments would benefit from AUI. Users that only have the ability to control a single switch or button are able to use switch access scanning to interact with a computer. Switch access scanning is a special method of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) where the focus of the application moves automatically in a predefined order and predefined time span from one control element to the next. Whenever the user presses the switch button, the currently focused control element is triggered. For a user that operates the computer with switch access scanning, the user interface and above all the navigation would be optimized for switch access scanning, thus increasing the usability and improving the navigation time of the user. Common state of the art approaches in UIA are user profile based that save the capabilities, abilities and knowledge of the user. Depending on that profile servers can analyse the content and structure of the page requested and create a web page that is optimized for the user. Some approaches monitor the user’s interaction with the web page and update the user profile if any problems with the usability, navigation or the content are detected.

Challenges:

A major challenging for adaptive web interfaces is the creation of the user profile which consists of the cognitive and physical abilities of the user. Especially cognitive abilities are difficult to model as soon as the model tries to store more details of a cognitive ability then just a vague description. It is especially challenging to model the user’s knowledge about a certain domain and to keep it updated. Currently there is no standardized definition of a user profile, so creators of adaptive user interfaces use different profiles for their systems. Therefore for each system users would have to create a user profile which can only be used in that system. Creating a unified and standardized user profile for all systems would be a major goal in the current research state. As the user profile stores sensitive data, security is also a point that has to be considered. User profile data has to be saved either locally or on the host server in a secure and anonymous way ensuring that this data will never fall into the wrong hands. Finally the adaption of the actual user interface based on the user profile is also still challenging. Adapting the user interface for different user needs in an automated way is still research in progress. When adapting the structure it is demanding to change it in a way that it looks good on different devices with different resolutions and interaction paradigms and in a way that it is optimized for the individual user. Another issue is the conversion of content into another format like EasyToRead or symbol language. Although some research is being made in that direction no automated solution has emerged so far.

Research Goals:

TODO

• Prioritized list of issues to be addressed
• Indicative timeline (short/middle/long term)
• Methodological considerations (e.g. studies, guidelines, standards, prototypes, experiments, implementation, dissemination, market penetration, education)

Issues to be addressed

• How can adaptation of content in another format like easy to read be automated?
• How can a standardized user profile be created?
• How can the user profile be used in a secure way?
• How can the user profile be automatically created?

References:

• Matthias Peissner , Dagmar Häbe , Doris Janssen , Thomas Sellner, MyUI: generating accessible user interfaces from multimodal design patterns, Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering interactive computing systems, June 25-26, 2012, Copenhagen, Denmark
• SLOAN, D. ... et al, 2010. The potential of adaptive interfaces as an accessibility aid for older web users. Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A), Raleigh, North Carolina, April 26-27 2010, article no. 35
• Stephanidis, C., Antona, M., and Savidis, A. Design for All: Computer-Assisted Design of User Interface Adaptation. In Gabriel Salvendy, ed., Handbook of human factors and ergonomics. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006, 1459--1484.
• Kazunari Sugiyama , Kenji Hatano , Masatoshi Yoshikawa, Adaptive web search based on user profile constructed without any effort from users, Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web, May 17-20, 2004, New York, NY, USA
• Werner Kurschl, Mirjam Augstein, Holger Stitz, Peter Heumader, and Claudia Pointner. 2013. A User Modelling Wizard for People with Motor Impairments. In Proceedings of International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing & Multimedia (MoMM '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, , Pages 541 , 10 pages.