This chapter introduces inclusive writing and how to incorporate it into research. We give general guidelines on language choice and suggestions on writing for and about specific user groups. However, language is constantly evolving. Preferred language for writing about people with disabilities changes over time, and with context, and can be a source of disagreement even within a user group. The inclusive writing approach proposed here covers three key points: use the included terminology and considerations as a starting point; verify language choices and other assumptions through feedback with participants; and strive for respect in all research interactions. The chapter also explores how careful thinking about language can make an entire research project more accessible and inclusive.

In this forum we celebrate research that helps to successfully bring the benefits of computing technologies to children, older adults, people with disabilities, and other populations that are often ignored in the design of mass-marketed products. --- Juan Pablo Hourcade, Editor

Older adults are increasingly accessing the web for numerous reasons: searching for health and travel information, socializing with friends and family, or simply for entertainment.Accommodating and designing for the range of skills, experience, and physical and mental abilities of this user group can be a challenge.Although the causes may differ, commonalities are often found among older adults and people with disabilities in terms of perceptual, motor, and cognitive issues with web usage.Web Accessibility for Older Users was the theme of the W4A (Web-4-All) conference in 2009 and, from a list of the many high-quality papers presented at the conference, the most relevant, innovative work was selected for extension in this special issue.This collection of articles addresses the growing need to better understand the current motivations, uses, and barriers for older adults in accessing the web, the subsequent design and improvement to accessibility guidelines to better include older adults, and the factors that have led to the current usage levels and the extent to which those factors will continue to effect technology usage for the next generation of older adults.Understanding barriers that may hinder this unique and diverse population in accessing the web is an important first step.Three articles in this special issue further current knowledge of Internet use, common problems encountered, and factors that prevent access altogether for older adults.

American Sign Language (ASL) currently lacks agreed-upon signs for complex terms in scientific fields, causing deaf students to miss or misunderstand course material. Furthermore, the same term or concept may have multiple signs, resulting in inconsistent standards and strained collaboration. The ASL-STEM Forum is an online, collaborative, video forum for sharing ASL signs and discussing them. An initial user study of the Forum has shown its viability and revealed lessons in accommodating varying user types, from lurkers to advanced contributors, until critical mass is achieved.

Multiple View Perspectives (MVP) enables deaf and hard of hearing students to view and record multiple video views of a classroom presentation using a stand-alone solution. We show that deaf and hard of hearing students prefer multiple, focused videos over a single, high-quality video and that a compacted layout of only the most important views is preferred. We also show that this approach empowers deaf and hard of hearing students by virtue of its low cost, flexibility, and ease of use in the classroom.

For many millions of users, 3D virtual worlds provide an engaging, immersive experience heightened by a synergistic combination of visual realism with dynamic control of the user’s movement within the virtual world. For individuals with visual or dexterity impairments, however, one or both of those synergistic elements are impacted, reducing the usability and therefore the utility of the 3D virtual world. This article considers what features are necessary to make virtual worlds usable by such individuals. Empirical work has been based on a multiplayer 3D virtual world game called PowerUp, to which we have built in an extensive set of accessibility features. These features include in-world navigation and orientation tools, font customization, self-voicing text-to-speech output, key remapping options, and keyboard-only and mouse-only navigation. Through empirical work with legally blind teenagers and adults with cerebral palsy, these features have been refined and validated. Whereas accessibility support for users with visual impairment often revolves around keyboard navigation, these studies emphasized the need to support visual aspects of pointing device actions too. Other notable findings include use of speech to supplement sound effects for novice users, and, for those with cerebral palsy, a general preference to use a pointing device to look around the world, rather than keys or on-screen buttons. The PowerUp accessibility features provide a core level of accessibility for the user groups studied.

For Deaf people, access to the mobile telephone network in the United States is currently limited to text messaging, forcing communication in English as opposed to American Sign Language (ASL), the preferred language. Because ASL is a visual language, mobile video phones have the potential to give Deaf people access to real-time mobile communication in their preferred language. However, even today's best video compression techniques can not yield intelligible ASL at limited cell phone network bandwidths. Motivated by this constraint, we conducted one focus group and two user studies with members of the Deaf Community to determine the intelligibility effects of video compression techniques that exploit the visual nature of sign language. Inspired by eye tracking results that show high resolution foveal vision is maintained around the face, we studied region-of-interest encodings (where the face is encoded at higher quality) as well as reduced frame rates (where fewer, better quality, frames are displayed every second). At all bit rates studied here, participants preferred moderate quality increases in the face region, sacrificing quality in other regions. They also preferred slightly lower frame rates because they yield better quality frames for a fixed bit rate. The limited processing power of cell phones is a serious concern because a real-time video encoder and decoder will be needed. Choosing less complex settings for the encoder can reduce encoding time, but will affect video quality. We studied the intelligibility effects of this tradeoff and found that we can significantly speed up encoding time without severely affecting intelligibility. These results show promise for real-time access to the current low-bandwidth cell phone network through sign-language-specific encoding techniques.

Virtual worlds present both an opportunity and a challenge to people with disabilities. Standard ways to make such worlds accessible to a broad set of users have yet to emerge, although some core requirements are already clear. This paper describes work in progress towards an accessible 3D multi-player game that includes a set of novel tools for orienting, searching and navigating the world.

Proper use of headings in web pages can make navigation more efficient for blind web users by indicating semantic divisions in the page. Unfortunately, many web pages do not use proper HTML markup (h1-h6 tags) to indicate headings, instead using visual styling to create headings, thus making the distinction between headings and other page text indistinguishable to blind users. In a user study in which sighted participants labeled headings on a set of web pages, participants did not often agree on which elements on the page should be labeled as headings, suggesting why headings are not used properly on the web today. To address this problem, we have created a system called HeadingHunter that predicts whether web page text semantically functions as a heading by examining visual features of the text as rendered in a web browser. Its performance in labeling headings compares favorably with both a manually-classified set of heading examples and the combined results of the sighted labelers in our study. The resulting system illustrates a general methodology of creating simple scripts operating over visual features that can be directly included in existing tools.

PowerUp is a multi-player virtual world educational game with a broad set of accessibility features built in. This paper considers what features are necessary to make virtual worlds usable by individuals with a range of perceptual, physical, and cognitive disabilities. The accessibility features were included in the PowerUp game and validated, to date, with blind and partially sighted users. These features include in-world navigation and orientation tools, font customization, self-voicing text-to-speech output, and keyboard-only and mouse-only navigation. We discuss user requirements gathering, the validation study, and further work needed.

A wealth of structured, publicly-available information exists in the deep web but is only accessible by querying web forms. As a result, users are restricted by the interfaces provided and lack a convenient mechanism to express novel and independent extractions and queries on the underlying data. Transcendence enables personalized access to the deep web by enabling users to partially reconstruct web databases in order to perform new types of queries. From just a few examples, Transcendence helps users produce a large number of values for form input fields by using unsupervised information extraction and collaborative filtering of user suggestions. Structural and semantic analysis of returned pages finds individual results and identifies relevant fields. Users may revise automated decisions, balancing the power of automation with the errors it can introduce. In a user evaluation, both programmers and non-programmers found Transcendence to be a powerful way to explore deep web resources and wanted to use it in the future.

For Deaf people, access to the mobile telephone network in the United States is currently limited to text messaging, forcing communication in English as opposed to American Sign Language (ASL), the preferred language. Because ASL is a visual language, mobile video phones have the potential to give Deaf people access to real-time mobile communication in their preferred language. However, even today's best video compression techniques can not yield intelligible ASL at limited cell phone network bandwidths. Motivated by this constraint, we conducted one focus group and one user study with members of the Deaf Community to determine the intelligibility effects of video compression techniques that exploit the visual nature of sign language. Inspired by eyetracking results that show high resolution foveal vision is maintained around the face, we studied region-of-interest encodings (where the face is encoded at higher quality) as well as reduced frame rates (where fewer, better quality, frames are displayed every second). At all bit rates studied here, participants preferred moderate quality increases in the face region, sacrificing quality in other regions. They also preferred slightly lower frame rates because they yield better quality frames for a fixed bit rate. These results show promise for realtime access to the current cell phone network through signlanguage-specific encoding techniques.

Transmission of compressed American Sign Language (ASL) video over the cellular telephone network provides the opportunity for the more than 1 million deaf people in the United States to enjoy the personalized, instant communication in their native language that is available to the hearing and speaking community. Video compression for this application introduces specific challenges, the foremost of which is the development of an appropriate quality metric for use in both algorithm development and ratedistortion optimizations. Efforts in recent years to develop quality metrics for video that accurately reflect the subjective opinions of observers have focused on traditional quality as described in terms of aesthetics. However, for coded ASL video to be maximally useful, it must be judged in terms of intelligibility by ASL speakers, rather than in aesthetics. In this paper, the results of a study measuring ASL intelligibility of sequences encoded using H.264/AVC are presented. Fifteen different sequences of ASL passages were encoded at four different bitrates, and fluent ASL users observed a random subset of these coded sequences and rated intelligibility and annoyance on a subjective scale. The results are compared with predictions of subjective quality based on both the continuous video quality evaluation (CVQE) metric as well as a MSE-based metric. There is a strong correlation between intelligibility and the quality metrics.

Many people have benefited from the flexibility that mobile phones provide. The Deaf Community currently has limited access to the mobile telephone network through text messaging systems. However, these force the user to communicate in English as opposed to the preferred language – American Sign Language (ASL). Mobile video phones have the potential to give deaf people the independence and freedom of mobile communication in their indigenous language. Mobile phone technology offers unique challenges for real time video transfer. Two limitations of this technology are small displays and low network bandwidth. Motivated by these two constraints, we conducted a small study with members of the Deaf Community to determine the video quality needed for effective communication. We found that general compression techniques do not achieve intelligible ASL under the constraints imposed by current mobile phone networks. More visual movement is required for videos of lower quality, even though objects in the video maintain visual significance regardless of video size or distortion. Screen size was found to be less important to viewer comprehension than distortion.

EyeDraw is a software program that, when run on a computer with an eye tracking device, enables children with severe motor disabilities to draw pictures by just moving their eyes. This paper discusses the motivation for building the software, how the program works, the iterative development of two versions of the software, user testing of the two versions by people with and without disabilities, and modifications to the software based on user testing. Feedback from both children and adults with disabilities, and from their caregivers, was especially helpful in the design process. The project identifies challenges that are unique to controlling a computer with the eyes, and unique to writing software for children with severe motor impairments.

This paper describes the design and development of EyeDraw, a software program that will enable children with severe mobility impairments to use an eye tracker to draw pictures with their eyes so that they can have the same creative developmental experiences as nondisabled children. EyeDraw incorporates computer-control and software application advances that address the special needs of people with motor impairments, with emphasis on the needs of children. The contributions of the project include (a) a new technique for using the eyes to control the computer when accomplishing a spatial task, (b) the crafting of task-relevant functionality to support this new technique in its application to drawing pictures, and (c) a user-tested implementation of the idea within a working computer program. User testing with nondisabled users suggests that we have designed and built an eye-cursor and eye drawing control system that can be used by almost anyone with normal control of their eyes. The core technique will be generally useful for a range of computer control tasks such as selecting a group of icons on the desktop by drawing a box around them.