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.

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.

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.

This paper reviews several techniques we have discovered while trying to extend the Firefox browser to support people with visual, motor, reading, and cognitive disabilities. Our goal throughout has been to find ways to make on-the-fly transformations of Web content including adjustments of text and image size, text style, line and letter spacing, text foreground color, text background color, page background removal, content linearization, and reading text aloud. In this paper, we focus primarily on the changes we make to the browser's Document Object Model (DOM) to transform Web content. We review the kinds of approaches we have used to make DOM modifications sufficiently fast and error free. We highlight the problems posed by Web pages with a mix of static and dynamic content generated by client-side scripts and by Web pages that use both fixed and relative placement of page elements, pages of the sort we expect to see in increasingly in the future.

In October 2005, the IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center and T.J. Watson Research Center hosted a symposium on “cognitive and learning difficulties and how they affect access to IT systems”. The central premise of the symposium was the recognition that cognitive and learning difficulties have a profound impact on a person’s ability to interact with information technology (IT) systems, but that little support is currently being offered by those systems. By bringing together internationally renowned experts from a variety of different, but complementary, research fields, the symposium aimed to provide a complete overview of the issues related to this topic. This paper summarises the discussions and findings of the symposium.

Accessible design for World Wide Web content has been a significant focus for many years. Guidelines, such as the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), give designers a list of checkpoints to be used to help ensure that web content will be accessible to users with deficits. Of these deficits, however, far less attention has been paid to designing for users with cognitive deficits. In order to address this, we present an orthogonal set of cognitive ability dimensions based in modern neuroscience, the SCEMA model, which designers may use to characterize an individual user and help better inform accessible design.

Loops is a text-based computer mediated communication system aimed at small- to medium-sized corporate work groups. We begin by discussing the goals of the system and the rationale behind its design, particularly its treatment of non-conversational text. Next we describe its realization in an implemented system, and discuss how an early working version of the system was'group tested,' and the changes that lead to. We then discuss its deployment within our organization, and provide examples of how it's used. We conclude with reflections on the usage patterns of Loops and their implications for the design of similar systems.

We describe the design of Loops, a second-generation CMC system aimed at smallto medium-sized corporate work groups. We begin by discussing the goals of the system and the rationale behind its design. Next we discuss how an early working version of the system was ‘group tested,’ and the changes that lead to. Then we describe its realization in an implemented system, discuss its deployment within our organization and provide some examples of how Loops is used. We conclude with reflections on the usage patterns of Loops and their implications for the design of similar systems. Author

We describe the design of Loops, a second-generation CMC system aimed at small to medium-sized groups in a corporate environment. We discuss the rationale behind the system, its goals, their realization in an implemented architecture and user interface, and our initial experiences with deployments of the system to two groups. In the course of this discussion we discuss two secondary themes: our design-oriented approach to research that focuses on system implementation and deployment; and our observations of and designs for the use of simple text for a wide variety of collaborative purposes.

We describe the design of Loops, a second-generation CMC system aimed at small to medium-sized groups in a corporate environment. One goal of Loops was to preserve the lightweight conversation and awareness model developed in Babble. Creating this sort of environment on the web, a stateless and asynchronous medium, posed both design and implementation challenges. A second goal of Loops was to provide mechanisms for allowing users to impose structure on both static text and ongoing conversation. We discuss our approach—a server that uses TCP/IP-based XML communication to drive a client—and discuss the resulting system’s architecture and interface.

We describe the design and implementation of the Timeline social proxy, a visualization widget that provides cues about the presence and activity of participants in an online conversation system. Unlike most awareness indicators (but see [4] for an exception), the Timeline shows the history of participants' presence and activities, thus providing cues about who has been 'listening' in asynchronous conversations. We discuss our experience with the Timeline, describing some of the ways in which it is used, as well as its design flaws and potential remedies.

We take as our premise that it is possible and desirable to design systems that support social processes. We describe Loops, a project which takes this approach to supporting computer-mediated communication (CMC) through structural and intemctive properties such as persistence and a minimalist graphical representation of users and their activities that we call a social proxy. We discuss a prototype called Babble that has been used by our group for over a year, and has been deployed to six other groups at the Watson labs for about two months. We describe usage experiences, lessons learned, and next steps.

In this paper, we discuss issues in design and usability of the IBM Computer Sciences Electronic Magazine (CSEM). The CSEM is an interactive multimedia translation of a paper magazine. It contains articles describing Computer Sciences projects at the four IBM Research Labs. Combining aspects from print, television, and computers, it is a useful vehicle for studying what we see as a completely new communication medium. We report both our design rationale in creating the magazine and the results of several user studies which helped us understand our successes and failures. These studies are a part of an iterative process through which we have redesigned and improved the CSEM.