Innovative adaptation, personalization and assistive technologies

Matthew Tylee Atkinson

Welcome

My name is Matthew. I am an accessibility consultant with The Paciello Group and a member of W3C's Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group.

My pronouns are: he & him.

If you like, feel free to include yours in your Zoom name (there's a rename function).

Zoom (and IRC)

If you'd like to say something, please use the zoom chat, or the raise hand function.

Our W3C host, plus my colleague from APA, Joshue O'Connor, will monitor the chat

We'll be taking minutes on IRC, but you don't need to join the IRC channel.

Please use zoom chat, or raise hand to talk, rather than IRC if you can.

Can anyone familiar with W3C scribe for us please?

Overview

Scene-setting (about 20 minutes)

Background
Assistive technologies
Adaptations
Human capabilities

Discussion

Suggested discussion questions

Background

Challenges we are aiming to address

Awareness of access needs
Discoverability of help on offer
- e.g. iOS Magnifier—super-helpful, but low awareness in my experience
Increased personalization of the system to meet the user's needs

Assistive technologies

Hardware/software, often designed for a particular access need
- Screen reader
- Screen magnifier
- Alternative keyboard, or switch input
- Alternative user interface
  - e.g. AlwaysInMind web app
- Different interaction modality
  - e.g. TPAC session: Voice Agents
Often make significant changes to output or input

Zooming content normally

Representation of full-screen magnification. The user is zoomed into a specific area of the overall screen. They must pan around the “real” screen to find content and interface controls to operate.

2D scrolling—distracting enough…

Zooming content whilst using a screen magnifier

Representation of trying to access “full-page” (2D) zoomed web content whilst also using full-screen magnification. The user has to pan around the web content, which is within a window that, in turn, is within the “real” screen, which the user also has to pan around. This creates two levels of 2D scrolling, which is hard, and tiring, to navigate successfully.

2D parallax scrolling: increased physical and cognitive load.

Adaptations

Generally more focused, often small, changes
- Font size setting (in OS, or browser)
- Responsive layouts
- Using text-to-speech (TTS) to read a single paragraph on a page, or a draft email
- Visually highlighting key characters or objects in a game
- Muting background music, but not speech/sounds
- …
Often make small changes to output or input

Mobile large font support

iOS Accessibility settings screen with default font size

iOS Accessibility settings screen with a large font size. Fewer options are visible on-screen, and their entries in the list have wrapped onto two lines.

Challenges of mobile large font support

Clipping! Unfortunately renders a number of apps unusable.
Scrolling
Hard to implement (hence the clipping)
- Declarative approaches like Flutter and SwiftUI may help

Automated interface adaptation: SUPPLE

Different users have different devices, capabilities and preferences.
Thus there's no one interface to fit all users and situations.
If the UI is expressed in an abstract way (think datatypes over widgets),
and the user's capabilities and preferences are known,
the optimal UI for a given situation can be found.
Multiple constraints (device; impairments; …) can be considered at once

An interface for a simple application renderedautomatically by SUPPLEfor a touch panel, an HTMLbrowser, a PDA, a desktop computer and a WAP phone.

The Microsoft Word 2003 Print dialog, reproduced with SUPPLE in default form (left) and for someone with a dexterity impairment (right)

Further information on SUPPLE

Daltonization

An Ishihara plate in standard configuration, displaying the number 29 — Initial

The same plate with colors adapted so it shoudl be more legible to someone with deuteranopia — Assisting deuteranopia

The same plate with colors adapted so it shoudl be more legible to someone with protanopia — Assisting protanopia

from GitHub: joergdietrich/daltonize

Further information on Daltonization

Daltonize.org [archived]
GitHub: joergdietrich/daltonize
Has been implemented in mainstream OSes
- Use display and text size preferences… (Apple)
- Colour correction (Android accessibility Help)
Anecdotal concerns around efficacy and tuning
- Aesthetics
- Tuning
- Research

TPG page about Colour Contrast Analyser, with normal, blue colour scheme and dark text an a light background

TPG page about Colour Contrast Analyser with inverted colours, making the blues orange, the background dark and the text light

TPG page about Colour Contrast Analyser with inverted brightness, keeping the blue colour scheme, but making the background dark and the text light

"Dark mode" media query

prefers-color-scheme: light|dark

Good

Out-of-the-box adaptation
Easily discoverable (system setting—it just works!)

Bad

Depends on the web content author
It just works (some prefer the choice as to when to employ it)

wikiHow page on how to make a good cup of tea

wikiHow page on how to make a good cup of tea, but with extraneous content removed, main content re-formatted, and symbols inserted to aid understanding of the concepts

Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII) home page

Human capabilities

How should our preferences be expressed?
- Favourite font size?
  - Computer?
  - Phone?
  - TV?
- Visual acuity?
  - Inform a font size suggestion per platform
The potential of adaptive interfaces as an accessibility aid for older web users (Sus-IT project)

Discussion…

Do you know of other adaptations?
How can we make content more adaptive?
How can we make browsers more adaptive?
Are there related community groups?
Are there any related specifications?

Conclusion

Thank you for attending!
Further questions?
- Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group home page
- Contact me on Twitter

Errata

In the session, I mentioned a figure of ~10% incidence of color perception deficit amongst males. It was pointed out by someone in the audience (I didn't catch your name; sorry) that that figure is for Caucasian males, and that it is around 0.5% for females.

I was able to find some publicly available data on the incidence of different forms of color perception deficit across populations in the Epidemiology section of Wikipedia's article "Color blindness".

Meta