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Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Show Notes:
Davide Bolchini, PhD, Chair of Department of Human-Centered Computing at School of Informatics @ IUPUI
dbolchin@iupui.edu | http://soic.iupui.edu/people/davide-bolchini/ | http://mypage.iu.edu/~dbolchin/
Forbes: Using Technology To Mitigate Cognitive Disabilities http://buff.ly/1tWYMGf
Web Accessibility Day | National Federation of the Blind http://buff.ly/1sfV4n7
Started a 30 days with Android experiment | Marco’s accessibility blog http://buff.ly/1tWTSJu
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DAVIDE BOLCHINI: Hi, this is Davide Bolchini, and I’m an Associate Professor of Human Centered Computing and Department chair in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, Purdue University in Indianapolis, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.
WADE WINGLER: Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana with your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology, designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs. Welcome to episode number 167 of Assistive Technology Update. It’s scheduled to be released on August 8 of 2014.
My guest today is Dr. Davide Bolchini from the IU School of Informatics here in Indianapolis. We’re going to talk about a new audio web interface.
We have a story from Forbes magazine about socially assistive robots, the NFB is doing a training on web accessibility, and we spend some time talking about Marco from Mozilla and his experiment with 30 days of android.
We hope you’ll check out our website at www.eastersealstech.com, shoot us a note on Twitter at INDATA Project, or leave your question or comment on our listener line. That number is 317-721-7124.
I’ve mentioned it a few times here on the show before. I’m always a sucker for a good robot story, but this one is a little bit different. I’m looking at an article from the Mercury news talking about Paro, that’s a robot and is designed to help the elderly. It was created by Japanese inventor and is part of a new class of socially assistive robots. This one is being used in a Sunny View Retirement Community in Cupertino, California. It’s used by elderly folks who have had strokes or other kinds of conditions. It looks like a baby harp seal and is designed to give these folks somebody or something to take care of and to hang out with and have a social experience.
There is some controversy related to this. Some critics feel that people might become dependent on robots and technology as opposed to having social interaction; however, Professor Maja Matarick says that the alternatives for these people might be to stare at the floor or television for hours. This is a better alternative. Katie Hoffman is the director of activities there at Sunny View and she says that they also have a cat and a dog for visitors — or visitors sometimes bring their dogs, but one of the challenges with animals and sometimes they can pose safety issues or they can be messy. She also talks about the fact that they have been able to use Paro the robot in place of medication sometimes.
They have some interesting feedback here from some of the residents that talk about how some folks have cradled or kissed or cuddled the creature but then they talk about a guy who is 92 years old and wasn’t so excited about it. He said, “What shall I say to you?” to the robot. He handed it back and said, “Here, you can have it.” He wasn’t so excited about it.
I think this is an interesting topic to talk about social robots and robust are going to help people with social needs and social behaviors. Professor Matarick said, “We need to think about the humane and ethical use of technology because these things are coming.” It’s kind of a long article. Has a lot of interesting photographs. I would encourage you to check it out. I’ll pop a link in the show notes and you can learn more about Paro, the robot designed to help the elderly.
I’m looking at a headline here from Forbes magazine. It reads, “Using technology to mitigate cognitive disabilities.” The article starts off talking about the fact that in 2013, the Department of Labor established a baseline of 7% of their contracted labor force to include people with disabilities. Of course, that’s going to mean folks with intellectual and cognitive disabilities as well. In fact, the article goes on to say that up to 25% of the workforce may be experiencing some kind of cognitive issue at any given time. They quote an article expert here named Madeleine Seko who talks about some of the technologies that might be available to help. Some of the things she mentions includes My Bionic Brain, a technology for the iPad from cognitive harmonics. It’s a personal life management tool to help folks with cognitive disabilities deal with personal organization and productivity. PEAT by Brain Aid is another PDA-based system helping people with executive functions. BioZen is a technology from the national Center for telehealth and technology. It’s a smartphone app and is designed to assist servicemembers with PTSD and brain injury. And then something I’m familiar with which is Livescribe. It’s a digital pen that allows you to record the audio in the room as well as take handwritten notes and have them played back for you in a pretty cool way. I love it when mention publications like Forbes gives a nod to our industry, so I’m going to pop a link in the show notes and you can see what Forbes is talking about in terms of using technology to mitigate cognitive disabilities. Check our show notes.
Are you in the Washington, DC area and are you interested in how people with disabilities and people who use assistive technology access the web? Well, the National Federation for the Blind is going to have a training on September 9 in Baltimore, Maryland. It’s all about web accessibility. It’s a full day event and in the morning they’re going to have presenters from the Department of Justice, from Deque, from Humana, from California State University and George Mason University, talking about the importance of website accessibility. In the afternoon, they’re going to have sessions on policy that will include people from the Department of Homeland Security, the Maryland State Board of elections, and US Access Board. Then technical sessions from Actuate and Deque and Google talking about how you can make your web content more accessible to people who use assistive technology. There’s a cost to participate. It’s $80, but I’ll stick a link in the show notes over to the registration page where you can learn all about the training and whether or not you might participate. It’s September 9 in Baltimore, Maryland, sponsored by the NFB. Check our show notes.
On more than one occasion, we’ve referenced Marco Zehe and his accessibility blog. Marco is somebody who lives in Germany. He’s blind, he’s a web accessibility activist, and he works at Mozilla. He has decided to do a 30 days with android experiment. He has been using iOS as his main mobile platform for about five years or so, and just here in the last couple of days he has handed his iPhone to his wife, asked her to confiscate it for him, and he is going to spend 30 days with android as somebody who is blind relying on it solely. For this, he has created a special blog. It’s 30dayswithandroid.blogspot.de and I’ll pop a link in the show notes where he’s going to give us updates on how this process is going. He also decided to set up a Twitter hashtag for that, so #30dayswithandroid is the hashtag that he’s going to be using on Twitter to chronicle his experiment here with switching from iOS over to android. I think that’s pretty cool and pretty interesting. I’m also interested in learning more about android so interested in following Marco’s experiment. I’m going to pop a link in the show notes that you can find the blog and you can also find the Twitter hashtag and you can check out what Marco is doing with android. Check our show notes.
Many of you know that I am an adjunct faculty member at a couple of schools and teach some courses on assistive technology. One of them I’m just finishing up right now, and a student had a question for me that that was a pretty good one. So I asked her to call and put it on our listener line so that we can address it here on our show. Here’s the question from Esther.
>> Hi, I have a question regarding assistive technology that’s not working properly. Is that something that you recommend going to a tech person at our school about, or should we contact Easter Seals, or is that something we should go to the company that we purchase the product from? What are your recommendations for the cheapest and most effective work to be accomplished?
WADE WINGLER: I think that’s a question that probably happens on a fairly regular basis, especially for educators and others who don’t work with assistive technology all the time. I kind of have a two-part answer here. First, if you happen to know that there’s somebody in house, either the user of assistive technology or another educator or even an IT or AT person at the school, definitely asked them because you might find that that’s a faster way to get information about the problem. If you’re having a problem with some assistive technology, it’s likely that somebody else has had that problem too.
If that doesn’t work, definitely reach out to the manufacture or the distributor of the technology and ask them. If you think about it, they are motivated to sell and support the technology so they’re going to know a ton about it and be able to answer most of the questions that come along. I think both are good answers. I think for me come out probably start with the local folks who I can get a hold of very quickly and then pretty quickly thereafter go to one of the manufacturers, especially if it’s a recently purchased product that might still be under warranty.
You mentioned Easter Seals, our host organization. There are certainly lots of assistive technology practitioners and specialists out there who might be able to help with those technical issues there. That’s another pretty decent option. There is oftentimes going to be a cost associated with that. I would consider that a viable option but maybe after you’ve tried some new local folks in your school and then the manufacturer. Thanks for your call.
If other listeners have calls for our listener line, questions about technology or procedures or whatever you have, give us a call. That number is 317-721-7124. It’s a voicemail box that’s available 24 hours a day. Leave your message there and you may show up on an upcoming episode of assistive technology update.
I’m constantly fascinated by new technology. I think the Internet is one of the most powerful tools in our generation if maybe even our lifetime. I’m also excited when I get to meet people who have similar interests. Not too long ago, a gentleman came through our doors named Dr. Davide Bolchini who you’re about to meet. He is an associate professor at Indiana University, Purdue University in Indianapolis. Here in central Indiana we call that IUPUI. He also happens to be the chair of the department that’s called Human Centered Computing which is within the School of Informatics. A lot of technical stuff going on there. The reason I wanted Dr. Bolchini to spend some time with us today is he is interested in auditory or aural interfaces for the web and computing devices. We’re going to jump into a pretty interesting topic here. Before we do that, Dr. Bolchini, are you there?
DAVIDE BOLCHINI: Yes. How are you?
WADE WINGLER: Good. Davide, thank you so much for taking time out of your morning. I know you’ve got a lot of meeting going on today so I’m pleased and thankful that you took some time to talk with my audience a little bit. I know we’re going to talk about some fairly technical stuff today, but before we jump into the technology side of it, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and how you became interested in technology for people with disabilities?
DAVIDE BOLCHINI: Yes. Thanks for inviting me to the show. I teach in a field called Human Computer Interaction here in the School of Informatics and Computing. I do research in the area of accessibility, specifically interested in web accessibility and accessibility to web applications.
I think the fascination to me for this field came probably around 14 years ago while I was working with my PC advisor in Switzerland, the University of Lugano. We were working on a European funded research project. Part of this project was to develop an accessible websites for the museum in Germany. We looked at the accessibility of these websites. Of course there was a lot of interesting work to do in terms of making the content accessible, making the overall site and graphics and content accessible. So we started to apply the usual aspects of accessibility technologies including W3C guidelines for accessibility, the standards available.
But then we quickly realized that there is so much work to do not just to making the website accessible but actually making it usable. The metaphor we would use that I remember is you can have an accessible building when you can have an accessible ramp into the building, but if you have to go on this ramp for 50 floors high, it still technically really accessible but it’s hardly usable. It’s very frustrating. So we were still looking not just that the technical aspect of disability but how to make a website usable. Those two things for us really going together.
We started to work on that topic, and then when I came here with Indiana University, I had the opportunity to really jump into that area more deeply. I started to work with the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired on novel ideas and novel research opportunity to improve accessibility to our web applications.
WADE WINGLER: So from Italy then Switzerland and now to Indiana, and working specifically with folks who are blind or visually impaired. You’ve develop something that has a name that I hadn’t heard of before. Tell me about the aural web.
DAVIDE BOLCHINI: Yes. So when we look at the traditional user interfaces, we typically use a user interface that are visually-based, and that has been history. But we realized that aural interfaces hold great promise for a number of opportunities. Of course the basic opportunities were to support accessibility and navigation of a computer interface for people who are blind or visually impaired, but we realize that aural interfaces are also very useful for people who cannot look at the screen all the time because maybe their eyes are busy doing something else and maybe they are looking at the street, looking at the road about jogging or walking and they cannot look at their device all the time. So there is an opportunity to explore what we call the navigation of the aural web, which is how does the web look like when the main means of communication with the web is the aural channel or the auditory channel. So these abilities, one, channel of application, was an Arrow application for this, but there are also opportunities for sighted user who has their eyes busy in a given moment.
WADE WINGLER: And you mentioned about driving, while exercising. My mind immediately jumps to maybe some medical applications, maybe a surgeon whose hands and eyes are busy at something is in its access to information. Do you have other examples of potential applications?
DAVIDE BOLCHINI: Yes. What we call the aural mobile Web, or mobile web browsing, there are more opportunities. All the apps we often talk about, the mobile apps, are very interesting but they assume that users are focused constantly on the device. So we are wondering, is your opportunity to basically decouple the visual attention from the device and use the auditory channel to really offload their eyes. So a number of mobile applications that we talked about, there is an opportunity to transform them aurally and there are lots of challenges and making them appropriately audible.
WADE WINGLER: And one of the things that comes to mind to me when I think of that conceptually is that that may be a different way of absorbing information. I have to assume that you’re looking at the brain science related to this as well as somebody moves from a mode of looking at information on the screen to absorbing information in an auditory format. Is that part of the work that you’re doing?
DAVIDE BOLCHINI: Yes. Part of the work is really understanding how we navigate the complex information architecture. So how we can make sense of a complex information architecture aurally, what type of new design and structure to put in place to make aural navigation still usable and enjoyable to use. This is definitely part of what we’re interested in.
WADE WINGLER: I get more and more fascinated the more I learn about this. Describe to me, if you, will how this web interface is different than others. I think I’m making the assumption that I look at any website and I’m using my hands on the keyboard and a mouse or trackpad to move content up-and-down. I’m looking at headers and maybe sub headers with my eyes on the website. But this is different. Tell me how this is different from the user’s perspective.
DAVIDE BOLCHINI: So the aural web is a collection of several projects that we started exploring in the areas, not just one single interface, but we really explored a number of different types of interfaces in this area.
So the first example I would give you is we looked at both web application and mobile applications and we looked at how they are currently structured. So if you look at the typical web application, it could be structured as a hierarchy, so as a tree structure. You go on a homepage. From the homepage you go to a section. From a section you go to a subsection, etc. So you have a traditionally large information architecture which is hierarchically structured. The way typically that you navigate with a keyboard or mouse as you mention is to go to page to page and you move forward.
But imagine a 50% of our navigation is actually not forward the backwards. So we often without our realizing it engage in back navigation. Back navigation is fundamental in everything that we do to find a point in the website to reorient ourselves or to re-find information we didn’t think was important it while ago but now we want to find it again. So re-finding information is a key activity in every navigation that we do.
Currently, mobile applications or websites support back navigation in a very rudimentary way. So I’ll make an example. When you navigate a website, you can go back page by page very quickly with your eyes. You can scan the pages to go back to it and then if it’s not the one you’re interested in you can go back and scan it again until you find the page that you are looking for. Back, back, back. Every website and mobile application tree, every single step of the back navigation as a page back. It is similar if you in dialogue like this between me and you, if you ask me, “Davide, could you go back to where you talked about your experiences with some accessibility.” What I would do if I was a current website, I would say, “Well, let’s rewind for example 30 seconds ago. Is that what you’re looking for?” No. “Let’s rewind 60 seconds ago. Is that what you’re looking for?” And so on and so forth. So the current structure of back navigation is very rudimentary.
What we tried to really see how we can improve or fast-track or provide a shortcut to back navigation by providing the dialogue that I said, which is a very aural experience. You can ask me, “Davide, could you go back to where you talked about your experience in accessibility in Switzerland.” I’ll say yes and immediately jump to that with a semantic reference. So with the specific point in that dialogue in the aural dialogue that we left off, you can resume.
So we developed a number of prototypes that basically leverage this notion of topic or semantic reference. Imagine as you navigate through a website, you can easily go back not just to the previous page but to the last book you visited or to the last author revisited or to the last product you visited. So basically we started to reconceptualize what we can do in a website, not in terms of pages but in terms of topics. Multiple pages can be classed around topics. We can use the notion of topic to basically provide an aural back navigation.
So we tested these ideas in two settings. With the blind and visually impaired users we did an empirical evaluation at the Indiana School for the Blind, a controlled experiment. We basically involved 10 blind or visually impaired users in navigating backward in a large website using the traditional back of the web browser and using this notion of topics. What we discovered is that the topic navigation saved a significant number of steps during back navigation. For example, those who use topics respectively completed their navigation task around 20% faster with respect to the traditional back. So these are one example which we can basically speed up navigation while using an aural interface, in this case using a screen reader on an accessible website.
WADE WINGLER: That makes a lot of sense because if I think about web navigation, it’s a linear experience in terms of the navigation tools, but is not always a linear thought process. That makes a ton of sense. I know that you have many iterations of this concept working. Tell me about the current implementation. Is it a product yet? Is it a technology that’s outside of testing yet?
DAVIDE BOLCHINI: So what we have is we’re pursuing a number of leads. Firstly, we have a ready to use prototype application that we have available on our website. If you Google Davide Bolchini, the first link is my professional webpage. You can download not only aural publications on the topic of the aural web but also the source code of all the applications that we developed that demonstrate this concept as they work. We also filed some patents with some of our PC students who are very interested in accessibility. So we filed two provisional applications with the IURTC, which is the Indiana University Research and Technology Corporation. One of these disclosures have been filed and is pending at the Department of commerce.
So we’re very excited to make these opportunities available come up both as open-source software so people can download and also as ideas that other companies can use to improve their applications.
WADE WINGLER: So if you look into your crystal ball, if you look into the future, what does the aural interface and this technology you’re working on, what does it look like a few years down the road?
DAVIDE BOLCHINI: So I would envision a world in which every visual interface has an aural counterpart which is designed as appropriately and in as a usable way as the visual interfaces. Having an appropriate aural interface will serve immediately the needs of all those who need to access an interactive system using their auditory senses in a variety of contexts, so blind and visually impaired but also people who are doing other tasks and cannot look at the screen all the time.
WADE WINGLER: Are you working on other projects that impact the lives of folks with disabilities? This is an important one but do you have other projects that are assistive technology oriented?
DAVIDE BOLCHINI: Yes. We have several projects. I just give you one example. This one that I describe is being funded by the National Science Foundation for the last four years. Now we just received funding from Google who is very interested in providing tools and advanced web browsers for accessibility. We are just finalizing a one year work on this Google project which basically deals not with the large navigation in a large context architecture but it deals with the navigation in a given page.
So we’re trying to explore ways in which when you navigate a complex webpage like an Amazon aurally, you can basically access very quickly important sections of the page. If you look at the Amazon webpage, you can basically scan through all the links, scan through all the headings, or the best thing you can do is to jump to the content. But it’s very difficult to immediately access the reviews of the product. Or when you’re in a shopping cart to immediately access the summary of the order.
So we started to understand what the challengers were of blind and visually impaired users in navigating complex webpages especially in commerce sites and we try to understand what were the top most important sections of complex webpage types and how we can improve the speed of access to those important sections. So this is a complementary project in the aural web navigation sphere.
WADE WINGLER: That is exciting stuff. It sounds very interesting and I know that you and I could go on, and we have from time to time, on and on about these topics that are very interesting. We’re out of time for the interview today. Can you let people know how they might contact you or learn more about your work? Is there a website address? How would they reach you?
DAVIDE BOLCHINI: Yes. If you Google Davide Bolchini, the first link is my personal webpage. You can access all our publications on accessibility, aural applications, and the description of current products we have on accessibility on the aural web. Email is dbolchini@iupui.edu.
WADE WINGLER: Great. Dr. Davide Bolchini is the chair of the Department of human Centered Computing at the Indiana University, Purdue University at Indianapolis School of Informatics. Thank you so much for being with us.
DAVIDE BOLCHINI: Thank you, Wade.
WADE WINGLER: Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? Call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Looking for show notes from today’s show? Head on over to EasterSealstech.com. Shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject, or check us out on Facebook. That was your Assistance Technology Update. I’m Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana.