Monthly Archives: March 2010

March’10 Snippets (Google Funding, Web Accessibility: A Foundation for Research, Hunkin’s Hypothesis, Web Science Institute, 508 Draft, and Call for UAAG 2.0 Review)

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Information Dump

Information Dump

Through the course of the month there are a few small snippets of information, thoughts, views, or opinions that I wish to keep a note about but do not want to devote a huge amount of time to, or create a major blog post about. The idea is that I really only want to create at maximum two/three blog posts a month, at a minimum one post a month, but with some substance as opposed to many blog posts which are really just announcements or rehashing of old information. In this case I decided to create a unified information dump for the end of each month so that the information is recorded and linked to other sources, but does not occupy many tedious blog entries. In this case, he’s my data dump for the previous month.

  1. Google funds new research to help blind web surfers: Drs Andy Brown, Caroline Jay and Simon Harper who are based at the University’s School of Computer Science, have already developed a prototype screen reader that has been successfully tested on blind web surfers in an independent evaluation. The team used specialist eye tracking techniques to find out how sighted people interact with complex Web pages so they could translate the pages into audio…
  2. Web Accessibility: A Foundation for Research - Cover Image

    Web Accessibility: A Foundation for Research


    Web Accessibility: A Foundation for Research [Amazon.co.uk|Amazon.com]: Doing well after a year and a half of being released; we just got the latest sales figures. At least the chapter authors knowledge is getting out there and hopefully making a difference within the Accessibility research domain. The book covers key areas of evaluation and methodology, client-side applications, specialist and novel technologies, along with initial appraisals of disabilities, this important book provides a comprehensive coverage of web accessibility.
    Harper, Simon; Yesilada, Yeliz (Eds.) (2008). Web Accessibility: A Foundation for Research Web Accessibility: A Foundation for Research, 1 (1) : 10.1007/978-1-84800-050-6
  3. Comment on Hunkin’s Hypothesis: ‘Technology Is What Makes Us Human’: I quite like the idea that ‘technology is what makes us human’ and I can seem some similarities between this work and the general ideas of cognitive science as discussed in Norman’s 1982 paper: ‘the idea was that domains strongly shape cognition, and that studying and supporting cognition in real and complex domains is salutary, if not essential, for developing a science of cognition and, of course, for applying it to real problems.’However, Hunkin’s more detailed quote seems too strong: ‘Technology isn’t just something outside ourselves, it’s an innate part of human nature, like sex, sleeping or eating, and that its been a major driving force in evolution. Tool using, along with language and bipedalism, is essentially what makes us human. The complicated theories used to explain why we first stood up are largely unnecessary. Our hands simply became too useful for holding tools to waste them on walking.’I could see how that if taken in an illustrative context it could be quite insightful, in that Humans are the only species which create more complex technologies (I’m not including chimps stone tooling as technology here) and so I can see how we could be defined by the technology we produce, or that complex technology is a predictor of humanity.
  4. UK Web Science Institute: It seems that the UK government is devoting £30 million to the creation of a new Web Science Institute. I can see that this may be politically expedient; the Web being one of the most powerful facilitators for human interaction and information dissemination that we currently have. The real proof will be in just exactly what evolves from this initiative, how that £30 million is spent, and what the focus will be as the Institute develops. It isn’t really certain yet who owns ‘Web Science’ but I would think that the many different views and takes on what Web Science really is, and the heterogeneity of the World Wide Web itself, will mean there will be many-a debate. While, the Web Science Institute seems a reasonable enough idea I hope that the funding will not just be confined to those researchers and scientists who tow the line and follow the accepted path set out by the Institute. The Web did not evolve in this way and it would seem churlish to expect research scientists to now follow some centralised vision of what Web Science is and how it should be investigated. However, on the brighter side I imagine this will be good news for many-a research scientist in the UK.
  5. 508 Draft is Released: The US Federal Governments draft 508 document is released.
  6. Call for Review: UAAG 2.0 and Implementing UAAG 2.0 Working Drafts: I’m a member of a user agents working group, and I been working with a number of other good people (volunteers) on these guidelines for the last two years. Until you go through this process you cannot realise how much work is involved, day in day out, in creating guidelines like these. Even though they are not the longest set of guidelines within the Web accessibility initiative the amount of time taken double guessing meanings, understanding intentions, and just plain wordsmithing, is huge. So let’s have your input, it’ll make my job so much easier.

Web-Based Interaction: A Review of Three Important Human Factors

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ResearchBlogging.org
Chen, S., & Macredie, R. (2010). Web-based interaction: A review of three important human factors International Journal of Information Management DOI: 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2010.02.009

I’m initially sceptical about all review articles as they often offer the pressed research scientist the opportunity to just publish a background literature review without any further insight into the issues that are being raised. I’m happy to say that this paper is not one of those in fact it provides a model for how a good literature review should be conducted. It has a number of definite outcomes, it is short and succinct, and the method used to obtain the literature is open and explicit. Another aspect which I also think is good about this paper is that section 6 discusses limitations and future needs and really pulls apart the different papers discussing the inconsistency of results between them and the lack of mixed methods used. They conclude that:

The main results from the analysis include that: (a) females have more disorientation problems than males; (b) flexible paths are more beneficial to experts while structured content is more useful to novices; and (c) Field Dependent and Field Independent users prefer to employ different search strategies.

The work is published in the International Journal of Information Management with an Impact Factor: 1.043 and a 5-Year Impact Factor: 1.316 (in the UK this means that this is a good CS research journal).

It seems to me that research based literature surveys of this type fill a hole within the current scientific practice certainly within the human factors and Web ergonomics domains. In these domains replication and reanalysis by independent third parties is often not undertaken, there seems to be a low scientific value for this kind of work. It seems that in HCI the ability to replicate experiments is not possible because there are no peer reviewed routes for data publication. This inability to replicate experiments due to a lack of public data means that HCI does not strictly follow the scientific method, and as such is sometimes seen as not rigorous.

This type of research literature review goes some way towards plugging this gap because: the authors are independent; papers under investigation are often conducted in isolation from each other; the results may support or refute each other’s work; often different methods are used and so, holistically, we could argue that there is a mix methodology at play; and finally, the results of the analysis are concrete. Further, if authors have investigated their paper corpus in more detail (as these authors have) then limitations and inconsistent results are brought to the fore. This enables us to discount certain pieces of work based on these inconsistencies, or identified disparities, with a corpus of research papers all purporting to investigate similar phenomenon.

Public Science Lectures

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Machine Learning for Asthma

Machine Learning for Asthma

I’m really very pleased to see a resurgence in these old-style public lectures and talks around science. I think they serve a really useful purpose in making science a popular topic and increasing the general public’s awareness of what science is all about. In this regard activities such as the Cafe Scientifique or Manchester’s own literary and philosophical society (the Lit & Phil) are doing sterling working in encouraging and presenting these kind of public lectures.

I’ve been attending these Turing lectures since their inception about five years ago or so, and in every case they’ve always been interesting and informative, although I would have liked to see a little bit more technical depth, similar to Steve Furber’s recent talk.

However, this BCS/IET Turing Lecture, held on the 17 March 2010 at the University of Manchester’s Roscoe Building, Looked set to be a good one! Embracing Uncertainty: the new machine intelligence.

The main hypotheses of the talk, to me at least, seemed to be that the amount of data gathered would soon outstrip the year upon year advances of computational power, the so called Moore’s Law. If this is the case then we need better ways of processing the data that we are gathering and this means we also need to have a high confidence in the sampling of the data used to make any predictions, as the full data population will not be able to be processed. The proposition was that probabilistic techniques should be applied in combination with a high degree of domain knowledge, and that this would give us enhanced results to those of the neural network style blackbox techniques. The three techniques used in combination were: Bayesian, probabilistic graphical models, and fast inference using local message passing to allow scalability. Chris also pointed to some research that he’d been doing on asthma and some free resources supplied by Microsoft called ‘Infer.NET‘.

In general this was a pretty good talk for an audience that was highly computer literate but non-specialist within the domain of machine learning. The only change I would have enacted to the slides was that the summary slide at the end should really have been shown at the start. This is because there was far too much work to be kept in your head without really understanding its significance until halfway through the talk; at which point all seemed to be revealed.

In reality there was nothing much in relation to accessibility in usability and certainly the user was not a focus of the scientific work, although for the search algorithms that were also covered, obviously the outcome is user facing. However this is really no different from most other aspects of Web research.

In summary then an enjoyable talk but without much direct application to the web ergonomics domain.

IET/BCS Turing Lecture 2010 – Embracing Uncertainty: The new machine intelligence

Professor Christopher Bishop, Chief Research Scientist, Microsoft Research Cambridge Computers

From: The IET/BCS Turing Lecture

2010-02-25 00:00:00.0 IT Channel

>> go to webcast>> recommend to friend

“Programmer Only” Web Languages are the First Step Towards Authoring Inaccessibility

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Straightforward Authoring

Once upon a Time, All Authoring was Straightforward

Web authoring is becoming an increasingly professionalised activity. What was once seen by programmers as being nothing more than a way of delivering information via a simple metalanguage has become an important platform for dynamic application development. We now see that there is a plethora of programmatic languages to make the Web more application like; browserless platforms, such as “Adobe AIR”, enable the mimicking of application interfaces and components while still using Web infrastructure; and, complex asynchronous communications and page updates have become the norm for industrial sites within the Alexa top 500. Indeed, the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 5 draft specification implicitly acknowledge these changes by its focus on application programming. In this move to authoring professionalisation the key aspects of the Web which made its adoption so rapid have started to become neglected. Indeed, it is my contention that if development continues, by programmers—for programmers, unique aspects of the Web will become inaccessible to non-programmers and hobbyists, indeed the very people who made the Web of today. Certainly, it is not my intention to suggest that the professionalisation of Web authoring is negative across the board, indeed it is quite useful for a number of applications. However, it is my intention to suggest that by increasing development of programmer facing languages, the Web will begin to suffer from author inaccessibility.

I contest that in the near future it will not be possible for an untrained author, to simply read a small specification of the language, open a text editor and create a page; simply uploading the result to the Web. Even the graphical tools which are supposed to simplify this process, such as “Dreamweaver”, have become bloated with features to accommodate increasingly complicated interplay of Web languages. Of course, simplified applications, such as “RapidWeaver”, “iWeb”, and Google “Sites”, have been established to hide this complexity. However, the freedom to use the tools one wishes, in the way one wishes, is rapidly becoming eroded. The reliance on complex language means that the Web is becoming increasingly restricted for the “Everyman” who help bring it to prominence. Although I see an accessibility problem here, I am not suggesting a “Luddite” like, return to the old days of Web authoring, but instead, am calling for a simplified all-in-one Web language (either declarative or meta) which can be learnt in a short amount of time, by untrained programmers, who can use a text editor as the creation tool. I realise that the complexities will need in some degree to be hidden, but assert that this trade-off will neither be missed or required by the majority of authors working predominantly in the “long tail”.