This paper investigates the accessibility and comprehensibility of cookie banners on websites, a common issue faced by users, particularly those with cognitive or visual impairments. Through a literature review and technical and cognitive expert evaluations of Norwegian websites, we identify key accessibility issues. Our findings pave the way for developing recommendations for more user-friendly cookie banners.

This paper presents the findings of a focus group workshop involving a diverse group of stakeholders from private and public sectors, civil societies, and academia discussing methods to measure the costs and effects of implementing Universal Design (UD) in workplace ICT. Two primary themes emerged: organizational and business-centric measurements, and societal measurements with an emphasis on people with impairments. These methods include a case-specific evaluation approach, a competence-and-awareness approach, and a broader societal approach. Based on the findings, we suggest extending strategies for Cost-Benefit Analyses (CBA) of UD in workplace ICT by introducing a practical cost-benefit workflow, promoting enhanced UD awareness, and integrating UD methods into routine practices.

In the digital economy, criminal activities have increased, making all citizens vulnerable. Financial institutions, internet, and telecom operations are taking steps to stop criminal activity, but it is not possible to protect all customers. Fraud remains a significant problem, particularly affecting elderly citizens. This paper focuses on individuals aged 60 years or older, a group that includes both high and low ICT skill levels. The necessity of being digital and protecting personal data is critical, especially as criminals use advanced social engineering techniques and AI tools, making it difficult to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent messages. Reports indicate that the elderly are frequently targeted by criminals, with terms like “Olga-fraud” describing financial fraud against older women. Understanding why criminals often succeed when targeting elderly citizens is crucial. This study investigates the human factors affecting susceptibility to phishing by analysing data from two samples: a national sample of individuals aged 60–69 years (Study 1) and a sample of retired individuals aged 63–79 years (Study 2). The research addresses four questions: the predictive value of the cognitive reflection test (CRT), data disclosure test, interpersonal trust, and conformity on experiencing credit card misuse or ID theft. Using binary logistic regression, the study identifies significant predictors of fraud vulnerability. Findings suggest that while CRT is not a significant predictor, data disclosure, interpersonal trust, and conformity are. The studies highlight the importance of personal traits and decision styles in online vulnerability, contributing to our understanding of why elderly citizens are often targeted successfully by criminals.

This work describes the development of a novel maturity model for assessing the quality of an organization's work with universal design of ICT, as well as the model itself. For the proper theoretical foundation, we have reviewed related maturity models and cooperated with organizational representatives and domain experts. To ensure a sufficient empirical foundation, the model will be subject to testing and validation in multiple case studies. For that purpose, the work details a proper validation framework. The holistic development approach resulted in 49 indicators grouped into the six areas: outcomes, assets, processes, competency, culture, and management. Maturity itself has five levels: non-existent, informal, practiced, managed, and optimized. An example implementation as tabular sheets is available.

Studien viser korleis personar med demens i eit ruralt område opplever ulike faktorar som påverkar høve til å ivareta relasjonar og deltaking utanfor heimen. Data frå åtte intervju er oppsummert i fem tema som identifiserer ulike områder med betydning for sjølvstende og kontroll over eige liv: Faktorar som påverka høve til transport og mobilitet (1), høve til disponering av eigen økonomi (2), høve til deltaking på uformelle arena (3), høve til deltaking i yrkes- og samfunnsliv (4) og faktorar som kan fremja høve til sjølvstende og deltaking (5). Funna viser at digitale faktorar set grenser for deltaking; blant anna opplever informantar at komplisert innlogging i nettbank hindrar disponering av eigne pengar og komplisert brukslogikk i sosiale medium vanskeleggjer kommunikasjon med både venner og familie. Slike faktorar kan dermed forsterka konsekvensane av lidinga, og ytterlegare ekskludering kan bli resultatet. Men denne studien gir og grunnlag for å tru at betre tilrettelegging kan gi auka tilgang til ulike samfunnsarena.

In this work, we propose a novel maturity model that suits the peculiarities of universal design of IT and ICT. The model is simply abbreviated as UDMM. It is domain-agnostic, targets intra-organizational application, and is free to use. Its design is influenced by maturity models in the related areas digital accessibility, usability, user experience, user-centered design, co-design and participatory design, as well as design-thinking. Besides a literature review, also interviews with stakeholders have been employed to gather insight for the model synthesis, and to ensure the model's proper theoretical foundation. The UDMM is currently undergoing further improvement iterations and will be tested and validated in practice in the future.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds significant potential for enhancing accessibility and user experience across digital products and services. However, mainstream web solutions commonly used by the general population still face accessibility barriers, hindering equal participation in the information society for people with disabilities. This article explores several promising applications of AI that can be used to create accessible solutions for people with disabilities. We also present our research, which aims to explore and demonstrate how various AI-based techniques can enhance and streamline accessibility testing for web solutions. We selected four success criteria from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) that currently require extensive manual work and developed four prototypes using open-source machine-learning models to enhance conformance testing. While the prototypes need further optimization and evaluation, the results suggest that AI-based techniques can significantly reduce the need for manual work in accessibility testing.

This work investigates how co-creation workshops, in which user journeys and personas are developed jointly with workshop participants, can be made as inclusive as possible for a wide range of participants and thus personas and journeys. The discussion is based on five recent research projects with 28 workshops in total and more than 78 participants, resulting in 31 user journeys and 25 personas. The lessons learned have been summarized as best-practice recommendations for the implementation of inclusive persona work and journey mapping. It is shown that both physical and virtual journey mapping workshops may result in a great diversity of personas and variety of journeys, provided that the participants are highly diverse, that universally designed tools and aids are used, and that inclusive techniques and protocols are followed.

User testing involving people with varying abilities and impairments are two of the key ingredients of universal design that can help to increase the accessibility and usability of an ICT artifact. However, recruiting adequate participants during the design and development process can be difficult, time-consuming and resource intensive. We suggest mitigating these challenges by employing user simulation as additional quality assessment measure throughout the design and development process of a digital ICT artifact. In the present paper, we present a protocol and a toolbox for Simulated User Impairment Testing (SUIT) that enables non-impaired designers and developers to simulate the perception of people with some of the most common impairments related to cognitive, visual, auditory, vocal, mobility-related and motor-related functioning. We compile a list of possible tools and methods that are readily available or easily obtainable in a production and design setting. Moreover, we complement this list with relevant user examples for each category, as well as examples of the most common barriers. Finally, we point out how the Simulated User Impairment Testing (SUIT) toolbox can be used to add an additional layer of quality assessment during the design and development process of a digital artifact and argue that it cannot replace the user testing part.

In this study, we have acquired the experiences of five individuals with visual impairments as job seekers and employees. Our focus has been on technology, but we have also shed light upon topics such as training, technical support, aid schemes, attitudes, and the employer-employee relationship. The interviews with our informants show that being able to use ICT is vital for participation in the workforce. At the same time, technologies introduce a number of technical and related challenges. One of the most important measures to remedy these challenges and achieve a higher degree of digital inclusion in the working life, would be to amend the Norwegian legislation, such that it no longer exempts the labor market from the requirement on universal design of ICT.

This work discusses how to build online public services and feedback mechanisms such that they are usable and are actually used, while fulfilling the requirements for EU's Web Accessibility Directive, security, and privacy. By means of an online survey among impaired users of the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration's online services, it is analyzed which challenges these users experience with public services and feedback processes as of today, and how both can be designed for better and more inclusive online services.

This work discusses recommendations for including diverse users in universal and inclusive design of ICT and discussessome challenges and possibilities of remote user involvement. Related research recommends a user-centered designprocess, the

In a case study, we transformed the existing learning program Language Shower, which is used in some Norwegian day-care centers in the Grorud district of Oslo municipality, into a digital solution using an app for smartphones or tablets with the option for further enhancement of the presentation by a NAO robot. The solution was tested in several iterations and multiple day-care centers over several weeks. Measurements of the children’s progress across learning sessions indicated a positive impact of the program using a robot as compared to the program without a robot. In situ observations and interviews with day-care center staff confirmed the solution’s many advantages, but also revealed some important areas for improvement. In particular, the speech recognition needs to be more flexible and robust, and special measures have to be in place to handle children speaking simultaneously.

We present a novel and versatile online resource named Clothes4all which is a website, web application, and tool likewise, and which can be used to study various aspects of web accessibility. The article elaborates on the tool’s development, its features and possibilities, as well as use and potential methodology. Clothes4all mimics a web shop for clothes and consists as such of a set of coherent web pages that can be freely used, studied, and extended as desired, in particular aiming at user trials. The site’s main feature is that single or multiple accessibility barriers can be injected into or removed from its web pages in a controlled manner. The primary application area of Clothes4all is the testing and validation of accessibility checkers and validators themselves, and hereby the site is expected to eventually contribute to more accessible web pages. A secondary application area is education, as Clothes4all is a great resource to learn about web technologies, web accessibility, assistive technology, user diversity, impairments, and other aspects of online accessibility.

Standardizing and documenting computational analyses is necessary to ensure reproducible results. We describe an R-based implementation of data management and preprocessing that is well integrated with the analysis tools typically used for statistical analysis of omics data. We have used these tools to organize data storage and documentation, and to standardize the analysis of gene expression data, in the Norwegian Women and Cancer study.

Social robots have been shown to help in language education for children. This can be good aid for immigrant children that need additional help to learn a second language their parents do not understand to attend school. We present the setup for a long-term study that is being carried out in blinded to aid immigrant children with poor skills in the Norwegian language to improve their vocabulary. This includes additional tools to help parents follow along and provide additional help at home.

Today, most software projects utilize an automated build process with unit tests, code quality checks, end-to-end integration tests, and more. To make software usable by as many people as possible, regardless of capabilities, accessibility testing must be integrated into the build process. The goal is highly accessible software where issues are found early in the development lifecycle. In this work, we have investigated the most common accessibility testing tools suitable for integration in an automated build process and split the tools into two categories based on their rulesets. The rulesets are evaluated against a well known demonstration site for calculation of the rulesets' precision, recall, and $F_1$ scores. Finally, we discuss the implications of their scores and how accessibility testing tools can be integrated into an automated build process.