Accessibility Assessment and Simulation
- When?
- Thursday 2 December 2010, 11:00 to 12:00
- Where?
- 39BB02
- Open to:
- Staff, Students
- Speaker:
- Mr Nikolaos Kaklanis
The core concept of the proposed PhD research is to empower the accessibility of ICT and non-ICT technologies by introducing an innovative user modelling technique for the elderly and disabled. This new user modelling methodology will be able to describe in detail all the possible disabilities, the affected by the disabilities tasks as well as the physical, cognitive and behavioural/psychological characteristics of any user. An extension of UsiXML[1] language will be developed, in order to express the Virtual User Models in a machine-readable format. Research will be conducted in order to determine how the values of various disability parameters vary over individuals and if these values follow any common probability distribution (e.g.: Gaussian, Poisson, etc.).
The great importance of finding such a correlation lies to the fact that it will enable making realistic assumptions for different percentages of the disabled population. For instance, if we know the mean value and the standard deviation of visual acuity for people with myopia and we also know that visual acuity follows the Gaussian probability distribution, we could find the value of visual acuity for the 80%, 90%, etc. of people with myopia. Tools for the creation/editing of the Virtual User Models will be developed. A Simulation Platform based on the ACT-R [2] cognitive model will be also developed to simulate human behavior on specific tasks. Moreover, applications focusing on accessibility of the elderly and disabled will be developed or existing tools will be extended according to the proposed methodology, in order to put the proposed methodology into practice.